Recap of Theory

1. Recap of Theory • Study question: Can you *really* explain/understand the first paragraph on pg 449? • Sometimes society benefits from defining deviance and sometimes the net benefits are outnumbered by net detriments. • Functionalism • Who benefits from deviance defining (not just who benefits from having the deviance)? • How does the definition of deviance reinforce boundaries? • Social disorganization: • Why is it that many people are ignorant of dominant society’s norms/values? • How did these subcultures get disorganized? • Differential Association • What’s the importance of learning a behavior counter to prevailing social norms? And what are their neutralizations? • Social control • Importance of family and community and other social structures • Importance of external social control • Labeling • A method of external social control to stigmatize and de-legitimize challenges to the macro-social power hierarchies.

2. Labeling Limitations (and how Conflict Theory is a response) • Deviants are just like us…only they aren’t always. • They ignored violent, less empathetic deviants at a time when crime rates were beginning to increase. • They ignored white collar and elite deviants • And once there’s a falsehood/weakness, the whole thing can be tossed with an effective marketing campaign. • And yet it’s odd that only after the labeling theory period did these criticisms get so much attention, since C. Wright Mills raised them earlier (see Chapter 2.9).

3. A macro-view of deviance • We will need to examine: • Political landscape • Economy • Cultural values • Changes in • SES • Labor force • Technology • Demographic Processes (Population structure): • Migration • Fertility • Mortality • Morbidity

4. Politics of Deviance • There’s a relationship between personal and political deviance • Deviance-defining is politically charged, and so is ‘un-defining’ • Deviance-defining is a process: identify, apply stigma, contain, justify. Can result in exacerbating inequality. • Power is a process, not just an object and so can have cause and effect. • Who defines the situation controls the situation, and same thing for deviance, so you need to dissect who are the political actors and what do they gain/lose from the definition?

5. Politics and Deviance (cont) • Labeling is a political act • Containment is a goal (extant), a method/technique (extant), an outcome/consequence (latent) and sometimes all three. • Maintains social order or restructures it. • Can manage social discontents (containing the disquieted or containing the disquieteds’ scapegoat). • Protects state from serious threat.

6. Modes of Containments • Social psychological – interpersonal • Economic • Geographical • Visual • Pharmacological • Electronic • Physical

7. Liazos’ Nuts, Sluts and ‘Preverts’ • If you don’t label, it doesn’t seem to be studied. • Focus on the macro-picture, not just the ‘small’ deviance. • Elite deviants/actors are not discredited people. They may even be following legal means. You can’t ‘deviance lump’ them, so they tend to get ‘conformist lumped’. • Agents of social control are not just the individual police, courts, etc., but the system that encourages and facilitates an exploitative system. • Therefore: Talk about ‘oppression, conflict, persecution, suffering’ (p. 490).

8. Economic Structure & Deviance • Review of Marxism: The problematic consequences of capitalism Propertied class in control of production and social capital. Proletariat – working class – without capital, does not share in full benefits of its production. Industrialists try to minimize labor costs with technology, leads to surplus labor, aka, unemployment, and the unemployed surplus labor needs to be controlled. Marxist solution: A. Overthrow capitalism (or, B, C) Democratic solution: A. What’s good for business is good for America. Corporation > labor. Control surplus labor B. Regulate business so it doesn’t cause harmful exploitation. C. Unionize. Individual > corporation.

9. Economic Structure & Deviance 2 • Labor needs to be controlled • New labor force entries trigger control responses • Unskilled labor is useful temporarily • When that utility ends, high unemployment occurs (social junk) • Labor that wants to change system is social dynamite • Shifts in economy introduce disequilibria • Farming to industrialism • Manufacturing to service • Globalization • Low tech to high tech • Oil economy to ??? • Control means creating deviant forms to be regulated • Drug laws are one of the ‘best’ • Blame the unemployed • Incarceration and asylums • Define those who reject ‘progress’ as immoral, then ‘contain’ (see slide 42) • Put in military • Educate/indoctrinate • Investing in workers mitigates need for control • Educate, retrain, develop • OR, convert problem members into agents of state • Form uneasy partnership with criminal (alternate criminal economy) enterprises.

10. Economic Structure & Deviance 3 • Economic changes in US and growth of populations to control. • Rise of industrialism and middle class (Dollars & Dreams) • People owned homes with GI Bills. • Productivity increased, like ‘walking up an up escalator’ • Union jobs in mfg lifted many. • Blacks also benefited, especially following civil rights movement. • Experienced of crime was relatively low. • Then…things changed. • Boon in consumer electronics increased consumerism • Yet at the same time, mfg took advantage of automation, outsourcing and offshoring. • And then more offshoring. • Low-skilled jobs for those with HS education seemed to evaporate. • Hit white males growing up on ‘wife stay at home’ model. • Then women entered labor force. • And Blacks saw loss of employment centers and opportunities. • See WJW: Declining Significance of Race • Black inner city issues not as much about race (he said) but more about economic structure changes and the loss of opportunity. • So while Marxism says conflict is about class, in the US it was about race, and then, began to be about competition for wage-earning jobs, that is, among the working class.

11. Economic Structure & Deviance • So what does this have to do with deviance? • When jobs disappear, people seek blame, and blaming large economic processes is not satisfactory or easy to understand, so they • Scapegoat • Do symbolic crusades and moral panics • Punish the victims and further remove opportunities.