Labeling Approach

Genealogy and Basic Content

The interactionist version of the LA is merely the application of symbolic interactionist premises to the study of deviance, and it views deviance as another socially achieved meaning. Derived from its premises as formulated by Herbert Blumer, and later by Robert Prus, the interactionist LA sets out to deobjectify deviance: Nothing is in itself deviant. Rather, the interactionist LA holds that deviance is a meaning that is conferred on a person or an action, and then negotiated, in a social process. The paradigmatic statement of this version of the approach was formulated by Howard Becker and holds that it is because people label behavior as deviant that it is deviant. In interaction, definitions of “deviance” come up in plural ways. In situations that are conflictual, the involved parties advance their definitions in a context, for a purpose. Which of the different meanings “wins” and becomes the basis for joint action lies in the dynamics of the encounter. This points the interactionist researcher to this encounter as her or his field of study and interferes with many questions classical criminological perspectives are used to asking.

Research Practices and Studies

In practice, this perspective makes the defining features of classical approaches problematic. Classical deviance studies tally the prevalence of certain deviant acts and the causes for them. To do so, these studies need to enact a strict certainty about what a deviant action is. This is usually done through “operationalization”—finding a definition of deviance that can then be used to subsume actions under. For this purpose, they assume that deviant is what violates the norm and proceed to compare behavior with norms as researchers. Such questions [Page 394]work only when researchers fix a definition of the situation globally to look at stable categories of acts; interactionists, however, see such fixations as artificial, as violating the reality of the situation. Though “norm breaches” are a resource that the participants make use of for their determinations, it is them who do it, and the outcome of this action cannot be presupposed by the researcher's interpretation of “norm breaches”: Interpreters of norms can lose, seemingly secure meanings can tumble, and unexpected arguments can quickly switch the roles of offender and victim in any actual situation. The task of the interactionist researcher is to ascertain how this happens and to what effect.

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