Normalization

Analysis of the concept of normalization and its effects in various economic, political, and cultural contexts is crucial in the study of the production of deviant behavior and in defining policies and practices of control and contrast. An initial etymological analysis of the term shows that the concept can generally be used as a synonym of standardization, from which the adjective normal is also derived. Normalization, in this sense, relates not only to what is considered and perceived as normal but also to making something (an individual, behavior, or belief) normal, natural, and acceptable and ensuring it conforms to a certain standard. This definition implies that there is someone who defines the standard, the norm, that this is decided on and then used to assess other individuals or behavior and that the process of normalization is verifiable and measurable through the distribution and determination of a series of “normalities.” Closely linked to the subject of normalization, and considered its opposite, are the subjects of deviance and exclusion, concepts that are used as a litmus test to explore conditions of social order and reveal the close links between normalization and power.

The term normalization implies policies, rules, strategies, and rituals of construction of standards to which individuals are forced to adhere because of the normalities they represent, in terms of statistical distribution, moral imperatives, or distribution of powers. Regarding the historical and philosophical use of the concept, much attention is paid to the works of Georges Canguilhem and his student Michel Foucault; while the former mainly stresses the standardizing/normalizing activities and practices intertwined with the production of social normalities that emerged with the rationalization of political and economic means during the rise of modern industrial societies (especially in the realm of biology and medicine), the latter reflects on the political use of normalization in terms of exerting power in modern society. Modern societies are identified strongly with the proliferation of discipline, mostly in the realm of knowledge, as a form of [Page 469]power whose methods of exertion in schools, hospitals, prisons, and the military are directed to the production of normal people as opposed to abnormal (and so deviant, criminal, sick individuals). Specialists and professionals, according to Foucault, are the individuals in charge of normalizing people through the creation of standards, classificatory systems, diagnoses, measures, and examination, with which people must be made to conform. In philosophical terms, normalization works as a practice whose aim is mainly directed to the homogenization and standardization of social parameters and patterns used to distinguish directly and clearly what is normal and what is not in order to erase, stigmatize, and annihilate the abnormalities. The defined standardizing process is firmly connected to specific economic, political, and governmental strategies that mainly contribute to the construction of specific subjectivities: A process of normalization always implies the production of a subject who conforms to the needs of a given social system.

A direct consequence of normalization is naturalization, which mainly refers to the rendering of states of conditions, identities, and personal traits in a standardized idiom (biological, medical, or even judicial) to render them unproblematic, self-evident, and so to speak natural. If the systemic and macrosociological perspectives take into account the connection between power and institutional and political practices, a microsociological analysis allows thorough comprehension of the everyday manufacturing of normalization. The latter perspectives are grounded mainly in phenomenological and symbolic interactionist research, interested in the revelation of the microrealities on which the macro-foundation is based.

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