Labeling Theory.We used to think that the wrongdoing in deviance resided some-
where in the wrongdoer: You break a social rule because you are “that kind of
person,” with faulty genes, a criminal personality, or a defective soul. But now we
know that wrongdoing is not inherent in an act or an actor, but in the social context
that determines whether an act is considered deviant or not and how much
punishment it warrants.
Howard Becker (1966) used the term labeling theory to stress the relativity of
deviance. Labeling describes a relationship between a dominant group and the actor.
For something to be deviant, it has to be labeled as deviant by a powerful group—a
group powerful enough to make that label stick. (If you do something wrong and your
little sister declares it deviant, it doesn’t have the same sort of weight as if all your
friends label it deviant, or, even more, if the police and the juvenile courts call it
deviant.)Labeling theoryunderstands deviance to be a process, not a categorical
difference between the deviant and the nondeviant. The label depends on the group’s
relative amount of power.
The same act might be deviant in some groups and not in others. It might be
deviant when one person commits it but not when another person commits it. In fact,
an action, belief, or condition is neutral in itself. It only becomes “deviant” when
someone decides that it is wrong, bad, or immoral and labels it as deviant. For
example, think of women who are sexually aggressive or enjoy pornography. Society
might call them “sluts” and shun them. But if a man did any of those things, other
men might call him a “stud” and perhaps hang out with him.
But deviance does not only reside in whether other people apply the label
“deviant” to your acts. To become a deviant actor, you also have to believe the
deviant label; you have to to agree with the labels other people ascribe to you.
Edwin Lemert (1972) theorized that most acts, which he called primary deviance,
provoke very little reaction and therefore have little effect on your self-concept. If I
decide one day to run that red light on campus at 6:00 a.m., a passing police office
may label me as reckless and irresponsible, but I am unlikely to believe it. Only when
I repeatedly break a norm, and people start making a big deal of it, does secondary
deviancekick in. My rule breaking is no longer a momentary lapse in judgment, or
justifiable under the circumstances, but an indication of a permanent personality trait:
I have acquired a deviant identity. Finally, sociologists also have identified tertiary
deviance,in which a group formerly labeled deviant attempts to redefine their acts,
attributes, or identities as normal—even virtuous. John Kitsuse (1980) and others
point to the ways some formerly deviant groups have begun to stand up for their
rights, demanding equality with those considered “normals.” Similar to “militant
chauvinism” defined by Goffman when discussing stigma, examples might include
the disability rights movement, which has attempted to redefine disabilities from
deviant to “differently abled.”
Deviance and Inequality
Some sociologists argue that deviance is not solely a product of “bad” people or
“wrong” behaviors but also of the bad, wrong, and/or unfair social conditions of
people’s lives. What is labeled as deviant is applied differently to different people. The
powerful and the privileged escape the label and the punishment. Therefore, deviance
in itself is the product of social inequality.
In a groundbreaking article entitled “Nuts, Sluts, and Perverts: The Poverty of
the Sociology of Deviance” (1972), Alexander Liazos noted that the people commonly
labeled deviant are always powerless. Why? The answer is not simply that the rich
and powerful make the rules to begin with or that they have the resources to avoid
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL COHERENCE 177