SOC 212 Sept 24/07 Understanding Deviance

Chapter #4

Functionalism, Deviance And Control

Introduction  Percy Cohen remarked in the 1960s that ‘it frequently looks as though anyone in search of theoretical acclaim has only to discover on more defect in functionalism to achieve it’  Douglas’s critique of structural functionalism perspective on deviance is regarded as self evident and the contrast is dramatically made with the ‘emerging sociological perspective on deviance’ which is mercifully free from such errors  Functionalist approach to crime has contributed significantly to the emerging sociological perspective on deviance

The Sociological Background  Changes in an institution have implications for changes in others  Functionalists began to detach the ‘needs’ of the social system from the ‘needs’ of the individuals who, notwithstanding analytical purposes, compose it: this is most obviously the case with Talcott Parsons  Malinowski viewed functional analysis as an alternative to evolutionary schemata, not as a tool for their elaboration, arguing that it is quixotic to attempt to trace the history of a society without written records  Durkheim’s main intellectual concern, at the turn of the century, was to analyze the possibilities off securing social cohesion in the face of rapid social and economic change in France  Malinowski opposed the concept of culture associated with functionalism  The functionalist method of rendering culture intelligible without resort to an evolutionist schema was its whole point: that did not, however, imply a resistance to acknowledging the reality of change  Deviance is poorly dealt with, either as the product of system malntegration at the margins, or as that of inadequate socialization in childhood  Parson does achieve a sense of the magnitude of the accomplishment of social order, even if it is at the expense off an ‘over integrated’ view of society and an ‘over socialized’ conception of man  There is a functionalist anthropology and a functionalist sociology, there is almost no recognizable, schematic functionalist criminology  Robert Merton one of the prime functionalists, a man who had a very major impact on the sociology of crime and deviance, was reported to have no interest in criminology and little interest in the nature of crime or its correlates  It may be said that functionalism was established to analyze social systems conceived comprehensively, not any one system’s minute parts  From Durkheim onwards, functionalist maintained that the business of social science is with science and scientific knowledge which are themselves held to be quite different from indeed antithetical to the common sense knowledge of everyday life  Functionalist criminology may be represented as a somewhat piecemeal accumulation of arguments. It is not integrated, organized or coherent and it has not been subject of lengthy debate

The Functions of Deviance and Control Durkheim and Mead  Durkheim’s view of the proper rules of sociological method was based on a forthright positivism: the astonishing success of the natural sciences could be matched by the social sciences, provided the similar methods were adopted  Durkheim assertion that crime is normal is a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies  He could only secure his conclusions by stating the manner of the contribution that crime makes to social stability  It serves to heighten collective sentiments, sharpen perceptions of moral imperatives, more tightly integrate the community against the transgressor – in short, to clarify and reinforce the norms and values of the group  Durkheim failed to deliver a description of how authority works  To the functionalist, a crime free society is a contradiction in terms because to bring about the elimination of all crime would entail such a massive heightening of collective sentiment against it that currently trivial deviations would become magnified to take their place  “The Psychology of Punitive Justice” Mead developed a complementary them to that of Durkheim  Community’s need for the criminal to be subjected to a form of punitive justice in which the re-establishment of social order is stigmatization of the offender and the reinforcement of inhibitions against law-breaking among the community at large

Developments in American Sociology  There is no reason for appreciation to imply approval: to empathize is not necessarily to sympathize. Appreciation in this sense is a mere research tool used to enhance the study of any group  The injunction to empathize with the internal and subjective realities of a phenomenon is not entailed in classical functionalism  Merton, who distinguished between manifest and latent functions to stress the ways in which special phenomena, however immoral or unhealthy on the surface may actually contribute to the social order  Merton sought to establish unintended and unnoticed virtues  However, Davis, Bell, Merton and others in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were primarily concerned with the functions of the deviant: the dysfunctions of the conventional were merely the mirror-image that supplied a certain analytical symmetry in principal  American functionalists (Davis apart) were prone to neglect the second stage of Durkheim’s methodology. Sheer persistence of phenomenon was not sufficient to secure functionality: the ways in which it necessarily contributes to group life tended to be taken fro granted  Eriksson’s argument culminates in the linkage of the fear or deviance with the process whereby the very things is created  He argues that the volume of deviance has more to do with the community’s capacity to handle it than with the inclinations towards deviance among its members. Social control agencies tend to regulate rather than attempt to eliminate deviance, whatever they claim rhetorically about the war against crime  The development of social order is made possible only by human’s capacity to symbolize and so to habitually actions, which by repetition and reinforcement become reified, real, social things, as Durkheim called them, with the potency of exercising constraint over generations after generations  Deviance enters as a property of social order to serve as a category for the anomalous

Criticism  Percy Cohen lists three species or levels of criticism: logical, substantive and ideological  First, functionalist theories are viewed as taking teleological form which is ultimately unacceptable, despite plausible justifications for this form of argument in the human, as distinct from natural, sciences  Another problem concerns the testing of the theory. How could on possibly falsify a functionalist proposition? In the case of crime, for example, it may be responsible to apply the normal/pathological distinction to different societies on the basis of their crime rates  Finally functionalism promotes holism, the tendency to analyze societies as wholes or systems, which inhibits the exploration of just how a phenomenon affects different groups within it  It is also lacking in the very complexity towards which functionalists point as the chief characteristic of modern societies  Functionalists perhaps stand accused more powerfully of ignoring conflict, failing to explain change and employing conservative ideology as a consequence  Conflict can be regarded as functional and indeed, Simmel and Coser have produced lengthy essays arguing that period of open conflict can resolve otherwise gnawing strains in society; that conflict promotes the social solidarity of those who are bound together to confront a common enemy, that conflict is a clear warning of the presence of social problems and that conflict is often surprisingly orderly, a social process locked into there social processes and les disruptive than naïve spectators might suppose  In short there is a tacit but perfectly potent functionalism still lurking in much of the sociology of deviance Chapter #5

Anomie

Introduction  Like functionalism, from which it derives, it has become a routine conceptual folly for students to demolish before moving on to more rewarding ground  Robert Merton’s version of anomie theory, the turning point being Clinard’s collection of critical essays on this them in 1964  Durkheim’s original statement of anomie as a source of deviant behavior has received more sympathetic treatment, largely because Durkheim is so central a figure in sociological history and anomie is so central a concept in his thought  Anomie theory: among its strengths are a focus on the implications for deviance of one of the defining feature of capitalist societies, that is, the fostering of the propensity to consume irrespective of the material possibilities of such a course: a meta theory which is capable of application to societies other than those of the capitalist world; and the capacity, never greatly elaborated upon since Durkheim’s day, of addressing the conditions that may suffice to determine the breakdown of social order  Anomie theory was at first thought to be so compelling it was subject to unusually sustained elaboration

Durkheim’s Theory of Anomie  Durkheim’s conception of anomie must be set in the context of his theory of social evolution  In the transition of society from mechanical to organic solidarity that the division of labor is minimal, and the term mechanical is paradoxically employed to refer to the uniformity of consciousness in the simplest societies  In the latter, it is assumed that the division of labor, thought highly differentiated, has generated mediating institutions that assure social cohesion despite marked moral diversity  In the transition, however anomie results from the rapid growth of the economy without a corresponding growth in the forces that could regulate it  Anomie then is the peculiar disease of modern industrial man for it is accepted as normal, a mark or moral distinction, it being everlastingly repeated that it is man’s nature to be eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief or rest, towards and indefinite goal  In Suicide, Durkheim elaborates on the sources of variation in the experience of anomie  The techniques of multivariate analysis are deployed for sociological ends  His arguments rests on the crucial nature of the distinction between social integration and social regulation  The excessive strength of integration and regulation linked with pre- industrial societies and the types of suicide characteristically prevalent, such as the honorific and the ritualistic, derive from the excessive subordination of the individual to the group  The egoistic form of suicide was seen by Durkheim as the product of excessive individuation of the cult of the individual which he saw as the moral counterpart specialized division of labor  Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of society  Economic crises produced the contrary effect: a sharp increase in the suicide rate  Suicide rates were at their lowest in the poorest regions of Europe such as Calabria’s  Durkheim invoked the concept of anomic suicide that which flows from the disturbances such crises create in the regulatory aspect of social activity. Subject to deregulation in such crises people’s aspirations overshoot socially contrived limits and fix on the unattainable  Egoistic suicide is associated with lassitude, weariness, galleons and has its principle vices among those in intellectual careers, the world of though; anomie is associated with irritation, self-disgust, formlessness and draw its recruits from the industrial and commercial world in which anomie is endemic and chronic  Anomic disorder is beginning to preoccupy many sociologist of crime and deviance  Mike Davis argues that public, comprehensive, regulation has collapsed in LA. The rich buy private safety in their own defended enclaves. The poor are exposed only to perfunctory policing which keeps them under token control but offers no security

Merton’s Theory of Anomie  For Merton the key feature of his society of the 1930s was the contrast between the American Dream and the enduring reality of harsh economic inequality. The difference between society and the France of the1890a in which Durkheim had written, lay chiefly in the Dream and not the inequality. In Europe, centuries of inequality were institutionalized in the complexities and the subtleties of a class society that re-formed rather than changed in any dramatic way  He argued the condition of anomie which Durkheim had regarded as exceptional, as visited upon people in boom and slump but as otherwise held at bay by social regulation, become routine a built-in and unintended feature of the social world  He regarded his theory as only applicable to America  The pursuit of infinite aspirations was the product of a particular culture that needed incessant nurturing if it was to persist and develop  His sensitivity to the dramatic growth of advertising in the inter-war period  For Durkheim, deregulation led to infinite aspirations; for Merton, infinite aspirations led to deregulation. The result for both was the same: high rates of deviation  For those unable to hold the socio-cultural tensions in balance, however, four deviant adaptations were available: money success  Retreatism involves the rejection of both goals and means by dropping out of conventional society and yet not consciously striving to construct on afresh: the tramp, the hobo, the drug-taker are.  Finally, rebellion is seen as the rare attempt to resolve the tensions by not only rejecting both aspect of the status quo but also actively seeking to replace them by alternative goals and means  Anomie theory does not collapse when confronted with the realties of class and value conflict, as class divisions and value confects may be framed in terms of inequalities of access to material wealth which all desire  A criticism is that Merton himself, had recognized in a divers and complex society “money-success” is not the only goal; it compete with a myriad of other goals for a claim on energy and time; or it is itself mainly a means to quite different goals, such as family support and well being  Another criticism is that Merton’s theory is both historical and lacking in critical perspective

Anomie and After  Anomie theory is static, individualistic, mechanistic and focused on ‘initial states and deviant outcomes rather than on processes whereby act and complex structure of action are built to elaborate and transformed  Modernization theories of crime stress the disruptive impact of industrialization and urbanization on traditional ways of life  Their proponents seek to link the uneven development of different dimensions of modernization with trends in crime and its control  Property crimes are also more likely to be reported and recorded in more modern societies, due to the making of insurance claims  Rapid urbanization and uneven industrialization in developing countries are seen as the key causes preconditions for soaring rates of crime and delinquency  Modernization theory only sees crime as a result of development and the criminal law as crime’s necessary counterpoint. What it does not see is all the criminal law and crime that went into the very making of underdevelopment  In an important development of Merton’s theory, they assign a critical force to structural dynamics and more specifically to the balance among major social initiations  According to institutional-anomie theory, the form of institutional structure that is particularly conductive to high levels of crime is one in which the economy dominates the institutional balance of power

The Crisis of Social Capital  The adoption of the term ‘social capital’ notably by Pierre Bourdie, James Colemann and Robert Putnam, has nonetheless reinvigorated and reshaped those concerns. Community had come to have rather folksy and quaint set of connotations on the one hand or had been devalued by its endless invocation by policies,  Bourdieu: notes that social capital involves transforming contingent relations into relationships that are at once necessary and elective, implying durable obligations subjectively felt  Social capital has, as a concept, strong Durkheimian roots  Putnam documents the withdrawal of Americans from group and community life at every level  Putnam basically believed getting ahead has become more highly valued than getting together  He argues that it matters because states with high social capital do better economically, in human capital terms of health and education, democratically in terms of tolerance and freedom from persecution and socially in terms of owner rates of crime and disorder  Crime and delinquent subcultures are a form of re-capitalization in the wake of the huge capital disinvestments in previously prosperous industries and the communities they sustained

Towards an Anomic Culture?  Richard Sennett takes his analysis a stage further, seeing a new kind of character as needed to flourish in the fragmented society that has ensued from economic growth in the context of de-industrialization  In the realm of production and employment the rise of what might be termed ‘hit and run’ capitalism in the 1980s devalued long-term growth in favor of short-term careers became subject to delayering, casulization and non-linear sequencing  Other consequent social deficits are low commitment to the institution; low trust in the tope echelons and poor institional knowledge, much of which inhered in low status workers

Criticism  Criticism of Merton was that the lower class was pressurized into higher rates of deviance than the middle and upper classes. Anomie theory stands accused of predicting far too little bourgeois criminality and too much proletarian criminality  Merton reduces anomie theory to that or relative deprivation  Not all anomie produces deviance and not all deviance flows from anomie Lindesmith and Gagnon argue that the theory fails to specify clearly which forms of addiction may flow from anomie; or to confront the reverse proposition that addiction may lead to anomie; or to square with the specialized social skills  The application of anomie theory to a specific form of deviance raises in short the most fundamental doubts about its capacity to either explain or enhance our understanding of the origins, consequences and processes of development of deviance in general  Merton’s theory neglects altogether the implications of social control for the shaping of deviant behavior  Active social control refers to the growing organizational tendency in complex industrial societies with a high rate of technological induced growth to regulate activity in purely instrumental ways0  The anomie of success is against more prevalent at the top than the bottom of the system and applies whether the success is earned or not  A second problem is the difficulty of conceptualizing the chronology of anomie and deviance

Conclusion  Durkheim’s methodology is flawed but that does not invalidate the general support for his theory that can be drawn from a view of the official statistics  Merton’s application of the concept draws both its strengths and weaknesses from his Americanization of anomie  Lemert may be right in proposing the general inadequacy of anomie theory in any simple sense to convey the process involved in deviance and control  In sum, thought substantial revision is in order, there is a great deal of unexplored mileage in anomie theory whichever version we prefer.