Deviance

Often used as part of a pair with ‘crime’, deviance is the breaking of social rules that are not part of a legal code. For example, religious dissent, homosexuality and mental illness have all in their time and place been regarded as forms of deviance.

Much of the sociology of deviance, especially from the 1960s, was concerned less with explaining the original acts of deviants than with the societal reaction of deviance. Howard S. Becker's labelling theory and Erving Goffman's work on stigma focussed attention on the responses of others to the deviant.

Deviance was held to be caused by society in two senses. In the first place, an act or characteristic is only deviant because the social group has created the rules which define what is acceptable and what is deviant. Beyond the statistical sense, what makes homosexuality ‘abnormal’ is a set of norms that accept only heterosexuality. [Page 70]Another society could decide otherwise; in that sense deviance was always situational. The second sense of the social causation of deviance concerns the practical application of rules. Actions, characteristics and people have to be judged by some agency or person to be deviant. While this shift of attention from the attributes of the deviant to the social process of attributing deviance, generated a large amount of insightful research into labelling processes and their consequence in deviance amplification, some work degenerated into a sentimental romanticising of deviants and some mistakenly claimed too much for labelling (as when sociologists unhelpfully overlooked the neuro-physiological bases of some types of mental illness).

While deviance is generally seen as a problem to be solved, Emile Durkheim drew attention to the positive social functions of deviance. In The Rules of Sociological Method he (1895) wrote: ‘crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly impossible’. One important function of deviance is to innovate. Behaviour which is now regarded as radical and dangerous may be next decade's orthodoxy or, to put it another way, a society of total conformity would be lifeless. True as this may be, it does not explain why innovative behaviour should be regarded as deviant in anything but the statistical sense. Innovation would presumably be as virtuous even if it was not initially stigmatised and repressed. Although Durkheim does not himself make the connection, his second positive function of deviance could have been presented as an answer: opportunities to stigmatise and demonise deviance are useful for building social solidarity. The need to unite periodically against a common threat is so great, Durkheim believes, that in a community of saints, where no-one committed any major sins, infractions of petty rules would be elevated to major sins in order to provide occasions for demonisation and reinforcement of the collective conscience.