Kai Erikson 1931---

• He’s going to try to test Durkheim’s notion that deviant behavior is a natural and beneficial part of social life.

• He chooses the path of letting groups in question define what is deviance

• Deviance is “conduct which the people of a group consider so dangerous or embarrassing or irritating that they bring special sanctions to bear against the persons who exhibit it. Deviance is not a property inherent in any particular kind of behavior; it is a property conferred upon that behavior by the people who come into direct or indirect contact with it. The only way an observer can tell whether or not a given style of behavior is deviant, then, is to learn something about the standards of the audience which responds to it.” 6

• It’s important to realize that people who are labeled deviant are conventional in most areas of their lives, most of the time

• “Labeling someone as deviant is an intricate process of sifting out what may be a fleeting departure or a few deviant details scattered among a vast array of entirely acceptable conduct.” 6

• When a person is labeled “deviant” the label becomes a master status; it tends to define his or her entire character and position in society

• People tend to overlook all the ways in which the “deviant” is still conventional

• How communities label people is an important part of the social control process

• Studying how this process occurs is as important to understanding deviance as is focusing on the “deviant” act or person.

• When deciding whether to apply a deviant label people take into account a number of factors which are not immediately related to the deviant act itself—– social class, – race,– past record as an offender, – the amount of remorse he manages to

convey, etc.

So Erikson asks:

• How does a community decide which of these behavioral details are important enough to merit special attention?

• And why, having made this decision does it build institutions like prisons and asylums to detain the persons who perform them?

• To say we do it to protect ourselves from harm is too simplistic.

• It’s hard to see how many of the behaviors that have been labeled as deviant are a threat to the group’s survival.

• Why does a community assign one form of behavior rather than another to the deviant class?

• Different criteria come into play on different levels of interaction.

• He is focusing on communities, but the theory should apply to all kinds of human collectivity.

• Communities are boundary maintaining—both in terms of geography and culture. Members tend to confine themselves to a particular radius of activity and to regard any conduct which drifts outside that radius as somehow inappropriate or immoral.

• People who live in a community cannot relate to one another in a coherent way or gain a sense of their own status as group members unless they learn something about the boundaries of the territory they occupy.

• The only material for marking boundaries is the behavior of its members.

• The interactions which do the most effective job of marking boundaries are those which take place between deviant persons on one side and official agents of the community on the other.

• When the community calls someone to account for a “transgression” it is making a statement about the nature and placement of its boundaries.

• The importance of publicity in this is evident in the amount of attention this gets in the news.

• Boundaries are never a fixed property of any community; they are always shifting.

• They remain a meaningful point of reference only so long as they are repeatedly tested by persons on the fringes of the group and repeatedly defended by persons chosen to represent the group’s inner morality.

• If groups benefit from deviant behavior, does it follow that they are organized in such a way as to promote it?

• One piece of evidence to support this is the fact that “deviant forms of conduct often seem to derive nourishment from the very agencies devised to inhibit them.” Prisons, mental hospitals reinforce rather than “reform” deviant behavior.

• We do not expect deviants to change and invest little in rehabilitation.

• The decision to bring deviant sanctions is not a simple act of censure; it is an intricate rite of transition.

• An important feature of our society is that these ceremonies are almost irreversible. – Most provisional roles conferred by society—student,

conscripted soldier—include some kind of terminal ceremony to mark the individuals movement out of the role.

– But we don’t do this for deviants. So they often return home with no proper license to resume a normal life. Nothing cancels out the stigma or revokes the diagnosis pronounced upon him at the time of his earlier commitment ceremony.

• Labeling of deviants becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. – People believe that deviants never change and treat

them accordingly—with suspicion, distrust, even fear.– This treatment assures that deviants will not have

opportunities to resume a conventional life, because conventional people shun them.

– So their limited options often lead to further deviant behavior—possibly because only other “deviants” accept them, and because this may be the only way for the deviant and his community to agree on what kind of person he is.

– Police policies are an example of this when they use ex-convicts as a ready pool of suspects;

– mental health workers when they remain alert to the possibility of former patients suffering relapses.

• Thus the self fulfilling prophecy gains support by both the poorly informed general public and the better informed theories of most control agencies.

• This problem has been recognized in the West for hundreds of years. This should give credence to the idea that strong forces must be at work to keep the flow of recruitment of deviants intact.

• The focus of American sociology has been on forces in society which seem to assert a centralizing influence on human behavior, gathering people together into groups and bringing them under the jurisdiction of governing principles called norms or standards.

• Thus they have looked for the uniformities, rather than the divergencies of social life. How are unity, shared norms, etc. created out of diversity?

• We seem to assume the differences between people can be taken for granted, but the symmetry which human groups manage to achieve must be explained by referring to the molding influence of the social structure.

• But variety is also the product of social structure.

• So maybe there are two strong competing tendencies in society—forces which promote conformity and those which encourage diversity.

• If so, the deviant would be a natural product of group differentiation.

Themes to be explored in his historical analysis:

• The relationship between a community’s boundaries and the kind of deviance experienced.

• We may expect that each community has its own characteristic styles of deviant behavior. Societies that value private property will have a lot of theft; societies that value political orthodoxy will have a lot of dissent. This occurs for two reasons:

– A community which feels jeopardized by a particular form of behavior will impose more severe sanctions against it.

– The very fact that a group expresses concern about a given set of values often seems to draw a deviant response from certain of its members.

• The deviant and the conformist are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination.

• If deviance and conformity are so much alike, it is not surprising that deviant behavior should seem to appear in a community at exactly those points where it is most feared.

• The amount of deviation within a community is likely to remain fairly constant over time.

– The number of deviancies that can come to attention are limited by the kinds of equipment communities use to detect and handle them.

– The amount of money and personnel assigned by society to do something about deviant behavior does not vary much over time.

– In this sense agencies of control seem to define their job as keeping deviance within bounds rather than obliterating it altogether. Generally speaking we invoke emergency measures when the volume of deviance threatens to grow beyond some level we have learned to consider “normal” but we do not react with as much alarm when it stays within those limits.

• He is suggesting that the community develops its definition of deviance so that it encompasses a range of behavior roughly equivalent to the available space in its control apparatus.

• Thus when the community calibrates its control machinery to handle a certain volume of deviance, it tends to adjust its legal and psychiatric definitions of the problem in such a way that this volume is realized.

How does society handle its deviant members?

• Each has its own method for recruiting people to deviant positions and deploying them across the range of group space.

• These he calls deployment patterns and there are three types that seem to appear frequently:

– Periods of general license– Deviance regarded as “natural” for adolescents or young

people, but they are expected to change their ways when they move through defined ceremonies to adulthood.

– Special clubs or orders whose stated purpose is to infringe the ordinary rules of the group in some prescribed manner

• What these all have in common is not preventing deviance but exercising control over it in various ways