Chapter 3 Flashcards
(24 cards)
Interpretive theories
Send in contrast to positivist theories that seek to identify generalizable, immutable laws that govern the environment.
-Emphasize how people develop understandings of the world around them, other people, and themselves
Critical theories
Underlying interest in emancipation and working toward social justice. Focus on the power relations that underlie the creation of social rules
What are interpretive and critical theories interested in
The social construction of deviance
Symbolic interactionism
Suggest social action emerges from meaning, and meaning is continuously created and recreated through interpreting processes during interactions with others.
Interpreting processes that contribute to our meanings and understandings are: role taking and looking-glass self.
Role taking
Try to see what the world from a different person’s perspective
Looking-glass self
to determine how to look or act and how we feel about ourselves, we imagine how we appear to others and what they think of that appearance.
May be significant or generalized others.
Labelling theories:
When individuals are given a deviant label, people start to treat them differently, in a way that corresponds to that label. Overtime, it impacts how these labelled individuals see themselves. As their identities change so do their subsequent behaviours and life choices. Being labelled deviant serves as the force for the transition from primary to secondary deviance.
Primary deviance
We all engage in little acts of rule breaking that are seldom noticed and rarely caught by others
Secondary deviance
When one is caught and builds a lifestyle around the way others see you
Master status:
A core characteristic that overrides your other characteristics. Once a person is labeled deviant that becomes their master status.
Dramaturgy, front stage selves, and back stage selves
dramaturgy: in social life we all have particular roles we play
Front stage selves: when in front of certain groups we play our roles in certain ways; controlling the images we present and the messages we convey to the audience
Back stage selves: when around people from our private lives we feel like we don’t have to play a particular role and can be our true selves
Stigma management
Having to control one’s characteristic that’s stigmatized. There are implications for specific stigma management strategies.
Tertiary Deviance
A stage that can potentially emerge after the transition from the primary to secondary deviance. Those labelled who develop an identity and lifestyle around that label may resist the label as being deviant. Seek to redefine “normal”
Deviant career
refers not to those who make a living out of deviance, but rather to the way that deviance unfolds in people’s lives. People enter deviance, manager their experiences of deviance, and may quit (or exit) deviance, all of which are intertwined with changes in their identities and understandings of self.
Career contingencies
influence the directions that people take at various points in the deviant career.
Critical Theories–Theoretical level and practical level
Theoretical: they analyze the centrality of structures and processes of power in the creation of societal expectations and rules, and people’s everyday experiences within them.
Practical: these are all theories that have an emancipatory interest—an interest in working toward social justice for society’s powerless.
Conflict Theories
¬ Presume that social rules do not emerge out of consensus but rather out of conflict and serve the interests of the most influential groups in society.
¬ Suggest that members of powerful groups are less likely to break the rules because the rules were created to serve their interests in the first place.
¬ Propose that members of less powerful groups are more likely to act in ways that violate social rules, either because
1. their sense of oppression and alienation causes them to act out in rule breaking ways.
2. Social rules have defined the acts of the powerless as deviant in the first place.
What did Karl Marx propose in regards to conflict theories
¬ proposed that society consists of a small group of powerful people at the top and a large group of powerless people at the bottom
o Society’s powerful (the bourgeoisie) are those who own the means of production; society’s powerless (the proletariat) are the wage earners who work for the people who own the means of production.
Difference between instrumental marxists and structural marxists
Structural marxists: propose that institutionalized social rules are created by the powerful to protect the capitalist economic system rather than to protect individual capitalists.
Instrumental marxists: propose that institutionalized social rules are created by the powerful to serve the interests of the powerful—the owners of the means of production.
Pluralist conflict theory
focuses on multiple axes of inequality that make up the structure of society based on conflicts between various economic, religious, ethnic, political, and social groups.
Culture conflict theory
that in societies having multiple diverse cultural groups there will be multiple sets of norms that may conflict with each other.
Group conflict theory
George Vold suggested that multiple groups are always maneuvering for more power in society and clash with each other as a result of their simultaneous struggles for power.
Power reflexive theories
Emphasize the intertwining of power relations and claims to knowledge. Some power-reflexive theorists analyze structures of surveillance and the creation of self-surveillance, by which we regulate our own behaviour even if no one else is doing so
Postmodern theories
Propose the notion of the “end of the individual: and posit that people have become consumers rather than citizens. These theorists reject overarching theories of society and claim that the moral codes that would enable people to rationally understand society have eroded.
