Deviance

Notwithstanding the term's relative obscurity in everyday language, deviance, or more appropriately social deviance, has long held a fascination for students of leisure – if not leisure scholars. It is a concept much broader in focus than either ‘crime’ or ‘law-breaking’ which was developed in US sociology to describe any social behaviours or practices that deviate from those regarded as ‘normal’ within a particular society or other sociocultural milieu. To this extent social deviance signifies those kinds of leisure activities, interests and life-styles which are condemned by the ‘value consensus’ of any dominant culture as ‘wrong’, whilst implying that they also need to be socially controlled.

In the 1960s there emerged what at the time was a radically alternative way of interpreting social deviance. Edwin Lemert (1967) turned this essentially functionalist understanding on its head when he suggested that it is not deviance that precedes social control, but it is social control that invariably leads to deviance. Following Lemert's lead the ‘problem’ of social deviance now changed to asking questions about how and why any society deems it necessary to socially control the leisure behaviours of particular individuals and social groups more (and in different ways) than others. It is also in this sense that the problem of social deviance has been seen as very much a ‘leisure problem’ (Clarke and Critcher, 1985), particularly with regard to the activities of working-class youth, because these take place in ‘the streets, clubs and holiday resorts & the places where their leisure activity has been most resented’.

Until recently social deviance has not been theorized to any great degree in leisure studies. Rojek goes so far as to suggest that, ‘it is no exaggeration to claim that, throughout its history, it has effectively ignored the subject of deviance’ (1995: 83). However, Coakley (1998) has drawn on the concept in the sociology of sport to argue that it is generally understood either in absolutist [Page 58]terms – ‘it's either right or wrong’ – or in relativist terms – ‘it all depends on who makes the rules’ – approaches. Coakley represents the absolutist approach as functionalist, placing an emphasis on the identification of social deviance as a departure from a predetermined social norm. By contrast the relativist position is represented in an over-simplified and theoretically naïve fashion as emanating from conflict theorists vis-à-vis Lemert who, in Coakley's over-simplistic view, presents deviance as a ‘label’ relating to certain behaviours or people who are identified as ‘bad’ or undesirable on the basis of rules made by those people in positions of power.

For Coakley, who appears to consider sport as being independent of its wider social context, the main problems with these two broad brush conceptualizations is that on the one hand they ignore social deviance which involves an over-comformity to rules and norms and on the other do not account for the ways athletes use these norms to evaluate both themselves and others. As a response, Coakley offers an alternative schema which draws on what he calls a ‘critical normal distribution approach’ to distinguish between ‘positive deviance’ involving overconformity or an unquestioned acceptance of norms and ‘negative deviance’ involving underconformity or a rejection of norms. These represent two ends of a continuum which in their extreme manifestations can be seen to lead to fascism (excess ‘positive’ deviance) and anarchy (excess ‘negative’ deviance) on either side of the ‘normal’ accepted range of behaviour. While undoubtedly showing a more sophisticated appreciation of the varieties of deviance in sport than many other studies, Coakley's approach is theoretically weak and ultimately too abstract, offering an objectivist, top-down analysis which essentializes certain types of ‘deviant’ behaviour and their sources.

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