Practice question · True or false
On Becker’s definition, whether an act is deviant depends on the reaction it provokes rather than on any property of the act itself.
Hints
- Ask whether the same act can be deviant in one setting and unremarkable in another.
- Becker locates deviance in the application of rules by others.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. His formulation makes deviance a status conferred by a reaction, which is why the same behaviour is criminal in one jurisdiction, unremarkable in another and celebrated in a third. The obvious objection, that some acts injure people whatever anyone says, is about harm, which is a separate question from the label.
Practise Integration, Anomie and Deviance
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More questions on Integration, Anomie and Deviance
- Arrange these contributions to the sociology of deviance, earliest first.
- Durkheim argued that the suicide rate is a social fact. Which of his claims explain why he thought it could…
- Durkheim explained the suicide rate by the psychological states of the individuals who died.
- Match each response to the adaptation of Merton’s five that it represents.
- Complete the account of the two concepts of anomie.
- Douglas critiqued Durkheim's use of official suicide rates as objective social facts. What follows from…
- Arrange the steps of Lemert’s route from primary to secondary deviance.
- In which year did Durkheim publish Suicide, his demonstration that a rate can be a social fact?
- Estimate how many years separate Durkheim’s Suicide and Merton’s paper Social Structure and Anomie.