Transcript Theories of Deviance

MORAL ENTREPRENEURS:
THE CREATION &
ENFORCEMENT OF DEVIANT
CATEGORIES
Howard S. Becker
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Moral entrepreneurs
• moral entrepreneurs are people who seek to influence a
group to adopt or maintain a norm
• they may create “moral panics” around perceived urgent
problems, e.g.,
• drinking alcohol or sexual psychopathy
• moral entrepreneurs can be divided into:
• rule creators
• rule enforcers
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Eighteenth amendment
• The 18th Amendment of the US Constitution (ratified in
1919), along with the Volstead Act, established Prohibition
(of "intoxicating liquors,“ except those used for religious
purposes) in the US.
• Demand for liquor continued, with the following results:
• criminalization of producers, suppliers, transporters and
consumers
• police, courts and prisons were overwhelmed with new cases
• organized crime increased in power
• corruption extended among law enforcement officials
• The amendment was repealed in 1933 by ratification of
the 21st Amendment, the only instance in US history of
repeal of a constitutional amendment
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Rule creators
• Rule creators: “moral crusaders,” fervent, righteous, often
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self-righteous
Mission is to promote their sense of morality - thereby
defining and combating deviance - for the presumed good of
others
Chief concern is the ends - persuasion of others - not the
means by which persuasion is achieved
Successful moral crusades are generally dominated by those
in the upper social strata of society
They must build public awareness of a problem, and have
power, public support, and a clear and acceptable solution to
the problem
•  tend to have “strange bedfellows,” e.g.,
• overlap & cooperation among Temperance, Abolitionist, Women’s Rights,
and anti-Child Labor movements in the late-19th, early 20th centuries
• alliance formation among conservative Christian activists and Feminists in
recent campaigns against human trafficking
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Rule enforcers
• Successful crusades produce new sets of rules &
enforcement agents/agencies, thus institutionalizing the
crusade
• Rule enforcers, e.g., police, are compelled by two drives:
• the need to justify their own role
• the need to win respect in interactions
• They are in a bind: if they show too much effectiveness
one might say they are not needed, and if they show too
little effectiveness one might say they are failing
• Rule enforcers feel the need to enforce the rule because
that is their job; they are not really concerned with the
content of the rule
• As rules are changed, something that was once
acceptable may now be punished and vice versa
 Such officials tend to take a pessimistic view of human nature due
to constant exposure to willful deviance
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Selective enforcement
• a good deal of enforcement activity is devoted not to the
actual enforcement of rules, but to coercing respect from
the people the enforcer deals with
• people may be labeled deviant not due to breaking a rule but
showing disrespect
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Selective enforcement (cont’d)
• Whether a person who commits a deviant act is in
fact labeled a deviant depends on things besides
his actual behavior:
• whether official feels pressure at the time to justify
his/her position
• whether respect is shown to enforcer
• whether the “fix is in”
• amateurs tend to be caught, convicted, and labeled deviant
much more than professionals (who know the “fixer”)
• whether the kind of act committed is high on enforcer’s
priority list
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SYMBOLIC CRUSADE
From Joseph R. Gusfield Symbolic Crusade
(Urbana-Champaign: University of IlIinois
Press, 1963)
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In US, conflicts tend to be organized along
cultural lines
• US lacked the class divisions & conflict found in Europe
•  relative consensus on fundamental economic matters
•  differences between ethnic groups, cultures, and religious
organizations assume greater importance
• "...agreement on fundamentals will permit almost every
kind of social conflict, tension and difference to find
political expression." (Benson, op. cit., p. 275)
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Moral reform as a political & social issue
• Moral reforms are efforts by moral people to correct the
behavior of the immoral people
• Moral reforms a way cultural groups act to preserve,
defend, or enhance the dominance and prestige of their
own ways of life
• Moral reform is a “disinterested reform,” divorced from
any direct economic interests
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The Temperance movement
• In Temperance, (moral) abstainers sought to correct the
behavior of (immoral) drinkers
• Since drinking and nondrinking have been ways to identify
the members of a subculture, drinking and abstinence
became symbols of social status
• Temperance was one way in which a declining social elite
– New England WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) – tried
to retain its social power & leadership
• “During the 1820's, the men who founded the Temperance
movement sought to make Americans into a clean, sober, godly,
and decorous people whose aspirations and style of living would
reflect the moral leadership of New England Federalism”
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Temperance goes national
• Starting in the1830s, abstinence becomes a part of public
morality, a symbol of middle-class membership and a
necessity for social mobility
• Abstinence is highly symbolic, seen as separating:
• the industrious from the deadbeat
• the steady worker from the unreliable drifter
• the good credit risk from the bad gamble
• the “native American” (i.e., US-born) from the immigrant
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Assimilative vs coercive reform
• Temperance featured two types of disinterested reform:
• assimilative reform: seeks to assimilate drinkers (largely
identified with the poor, the alien, and the downtrodden)
into the social system, to follow the reformer's habits and
lift selves to middle-class respect and income
• coercive reform: since the dominance of his culture and
the social status of his group are denied, the coercive
reformer turns to law and force as ways to affirm it
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19th-century vs 20th-century America
• Abstinence was “in” in the 19th century, “out” in the 20th
• Local culture of “small-town” America is increasingly
challenged by the rise of a nationalized culture and an
industrial economy of mass organizations
• In the shift from commercial to industrial society, values of
self-control, impulse renunciation, discipline, and sobriety
decline in importance
• Interest in interpersonal relations and conspicuous
consumption replaces interest in work and morality
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Prohibition
• The Eighteenth Amendment was the high point of the
struggle to assert the public dominance of old middleclass values. It established the victory of Protestant over
Catholic, rural over urban, tradition over modernity, the
middle class over both the lower and the upper strata
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Culture wars – then & now
• “There has been a decline in the social status of the old
middle class and in the dominance of his values. This
sense of anger at the loss of status and bitterness about
lowered self-esteem pervades the entire Temperance
movement today.”
• “Temperance has been one of the classic issues on which
divergent cultures have faced each other in America. Such
issues of style have been significant because they have
been ways through which groups have tried to handle the
problems which have been important to them.”
• What about today? What issues are important to today’s
“declining class”?