Text Exploration
Chapter One: Outsiders
In this chapter, the author introduces his primary argument—that being “outside” of society (or deviant) is a quality that is not intrinsic to something someone does, but instead is relative to how other people (society) have decided to view those types of things.
Social groups make rules and attempt to enforce them, and these rules define what is right and wrong. Enforcement of the rule identifies the rule breaker, and that person is considered to be an outsider. However, that person may not accept the judgement of being labeled as an outsider by failing to recognize the judgers.
Rules may be formal (in law) or informal agreements, “enforced by informal sanctions of various kinds.” That enforcement may not come from an authority, but instead may be considered to be something shared by everyone involved. These rules are the “actual operating rules” of the group.
People who are outsiders and are being judged are often labeled as “deviant.” While there are many ways of defining or thinking of deviance, the author defines it as the “failure to obey group rules.” Since people belong to many groups at once, those rules may overlap or contradict one-another. Together, this means that deviance is created by society: that “social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders.”
The author argues, then, that deviance is the product of a transaction between someone who is viewed as a rule breaker, and a group to which that person belongs. Additionally, a deviant act is dependent on how other people react to it, as those reactions (enforcement) are indicative of the group’s values, and those values aren’t applied equally to all group members. So, assessing if an act is deviant depends in part on if it violates the group’s asserted rule, and in part about what other people do about it. Deviance can’t be understood until there has been a response by the social group.
From the perspective of one who is labeled as deviant, the role switches: those creating the rules may be viewed as outsiders, and that raises a questions of “who can, in fact, force others to accept their rules and what are the causes of their success?” This is a question of political and economic power, and making rules and applying them is an issue of power differential. Since rules change, they are the “object of conflict and disagreement, part of the political process of society.”
Chapter Two: Kinds of Deviance: A Sequential Model
In this chapter, the author presents “kinds” of deviance by cross-classifying behavior and the responses that are evoked; this is used as a frame for further discussion of careers of deviance, and the slow move into deviance.
There are two main types of behavior, ranging from “conforming” to “pure deviant.” These can be juxtaposed (crossed) with those who are “falsely accused” or “secret deviants.” This model offers a way to understand the origination of growth of deviant behavior in an individual. Deviant behavior isn’t latent in a person; it develops in an orderly sequence, which can be thought of as a “career”—a “sequence of movements from one position to another in an occupational system made by any individual who works in that system.” Career contingency, then, describe the factors that allow or prohibit career growth.
The lens of deviant career growth begins with a “commission of a nonconforming act.” It’s likely that this act is not motivated—that it’s done by people who have no intention of doing it, and one way of explaining this is that they may simply be unaware that there is a rule that they are breaking. It’s commonly questioned in sociology literature as to what motivates a few to be deviant while most others aren’t; the author argues that a better question is “why conventional people do not follow through on the deviant impulses they have.”
There is a process of commitments that someone makes as they move (or don’t move) from “normal” behavior to that of deviant behavior. This is a process where “several kinds of interests become bound up with carrying out certain lines of behavior to which they seem formally extraneous.” When one becomes “normal,” they are committing to a set of behaviors that are related to other aspects of their life, and pursuing a deviant impulse will have “manifold consequences.” The potential for these consequences limits their engagement (while others who don’t fear or have those consequences have nothing at stake).
Deviance emerges from socially learned behaviors, and “one of the most crucial steps in the process of building a stable pattern of deviant behavior is likely to be the experience of being caught and publicly labeled as a deviant.” This activates the consequences, and makes a change in the individual’s public identity. Circularly, then, the individual begins behaving more like one with the qualities of deviance.
This, then, swirls around a broader view of moving from deviance to a career deviant—that after being identified as deviant in one space and bearing the consequences and public reaction to that, one may find themselves characterized as a deviant in unrelated areas as well. Now on the way to a career, an individual may find themselves as one who has no friends who aren’t in the deviant group, and the membership in the group solidifies the deviant identity and normalizes the behavior.
Chapters Three (Becoming a Marijuana User) and Four (Marijuana Use and Social Control)
In these chapters, the author describes research conducted to understand how people become marijuana users.
Common views describe marijuana users as having a psychological tendency for addiction. The author views this as incorrect, and instead argues that a deviant behavior in time produces the deviant motivation, rather than the other way around. The goal of this research was to understand the sequence of events through which someone becomes deviant (using marijuana). The approach the author used was “analytic induction” where he “tried to arrive at a general statement of the sequence of changes in individual attitude and experiences” of becoming a user. This method requires “every case collected” to substantiate the hypothesis, and “if one case is encountered which does not substantiate it, the researcher is required to change the hypothesis to fit the case which has proven the idea wrong.”
[I will skip the actual contents of the sequence of becoming a career user of marijuana, although I certainly recognize it from when I was 13...]
Next, the author describes that while there is an obvious and repeatable pattern to how use becomes normalized, the user has to still manage external social forces of control. Deviant behavior provokes a breakdown in this social control, and so these controls must sometimes be very powerful; power, and the application of “sanctions”, and a threat of punishment, becomes important.
The author identifies three levels of use that serve to build a career in marijuana use. The first is the relationship between supply of the drug; group participation and membership increase access, which then lead to level of use. The next is the idea of secrecy, where people limit their use of the drug based on the amount of real or perceived fear they have that non-users will discover their use. The third is a question of morality, where an outsider gains the moral inclinations of an insider.
Chapter Five: The Culture of a Deviant Group: The Dance Musician
In this chapter, the author describes his experience observing, and participating in, a group of dance musicians. He views this group as deviant, as it is part of a deviant subculture that has established dramatic feelings, norms, and behaviors towards people who are not in the group.
While some deviant behaviors are prescribed by law, like marijuana use, others are within the law, but are “sufficiently bizarre and unconventional for them to be labeled as outsiders by more conventional members of the community.” Groups develop a unique way of life. The author quotes Robert Redfield, who views a culture as an abstraction where meaning is attached to acts and objects, and is then considered, similarly, by those in the group.
Culture “arises essentially in response to a problem faced in common by a group of people.” A deviant culture, or a culture where people engage in deviant activities and are able to interact with one-another, is often centered around problems. These problems rise out of the difference in their definition of what they do, and the way others in society define what they do. Service workers can be thought of as a subculture, and this definitional conflict is often related to resentment over the control those they are serving have over them. “Conflict and hostility arise” and “a subculture grows around this set of problems.”
Musicians are a particular example of this service subculture developing around this hostility, and this is the group that the author observed. The author’s research method was based on observations with musicians. He recorded his conversations, and “most of the people I observed did not know that I was making a study of musicians.”
Musicians have labeled non-musicians as “square” and the author shows how this label, and the difference between those in and out of the group, come to influence a great deal of the subculture of musicians. Musicians view themselves as special and with a particular gift, yet as they are service workers, they are beholden to the naïve, problematic, misinformed opinions and views of their audience. This results in hostility, as musicians feel they “must sacrifice their artistic standards to the squares.” As a result of this, they self-segregate, and leverage things like slang to make a quick and clear delineation between insiders and outsiders.
Chapter Seven: Rules and Their Enforcement
In this chapter, the author examines the rules that are established to contain or moderate deviant behavior, as well as those who create and enforce these rules.
It is typical for rules to be enforced only when something provokes that enforcement. Enforcement itself is an “enterprising act.” The author characterizes the initiation of the enforcement as entrepreneurial, and the person who takes initiative in punishment is an entrepreneur. They only take initiative when they see an advantage in doing so: personal interest generates the entrepreneurial behavior. That person makes the infraction public, and once it is public, it can’t be ignored.
Often, there are different interpretations of the situation and the potential for enforcement of rules. This may be because there are two entrepreneurial groups competing for power, and in those cases, “conflict may be chronic.” Sometimes, this may result in neither group calling attention to the situation, as the result may have a negative implication on self-interest. However, when there are competing self-interests, “access to the channels of publicity” become more important.
The author summarizes the backdrop of enforcement, again leveraging an allusion to entrepreneurial activity. An “enterprising person” is required to force action of rule enforcement, and if there is conflict, enforcement only occurs “when the systems of compromise that characterize their relationship break down.”
Enforcement occurs over time, in stages. Values attempt to guide actions, but do not perform well because they are often vague and general. As a result, people hold multiple values that conflict, and may not be aware of the conflict. Values, then, provide only a general guide for action, but they act as a major premise from which a rule may be established. That rule appears to be consistent with the value, and tries to be specific about what is and is not allowed, as well as the consequences of breaking a rule. But values can be interpreted in multiple ways, and so rules do not simply and logically flow from values. A rule may then help one party and hurt another, and so rules are often structured to be precise. This is most true for legal rules. Some rules exist to make sense of conflicts between other rules. It is an entrepreneur who makes sure that the rule evolution, from general to specific, is effective and takes place.
Research Value
From Chapter One:
Studio might be viewed through a lens of Outsiders and Deviance. There are rules defined in and around a studio space, created and enforced by some and applied on others. The most obvious is the control of the space—faculty existing as outsiders from the administration, or students existing as outsiders from the faculty.
Another is the segmentation of those “in the profession” (often read as competent, or at least assumed into the norms of critique, making, and so-on) and those outside of that (because of their inability to make things, or to participant in the studio rituals), although this is much closer to norm following than rule following. It could also be viewed that the faculty go out of their way to actually eliminate rules and replace them with norms, as a sign of pride or as a signal of the nature of innovation and risk-taking.
My faculty research has shown that faculty-to-administration deviance seems related to space designation as being formal or informal, and suitable or unsuitable for use. Faculty describe finding a closet to work in, or switching to another room without permission, or being happiest in a space that the administration ignored, because they could drill holes in the wall without repercussion. There isn’t much discussion of rule enforcement, though; faculty imply they are deviant, but probably wouldn’t be labeled this way by Becker.
From Chapter Two:
I wonder if all of the act of design can be thought of as deviant behavior. We use words in the profession around risk taking and having conviction and creative confidence (and confidence to pursue an idea that others don’t like or think will work), and people think of creative people as slightly weird or crazy or distanced from the rest of the organizational culture in which design shows up.
Maybe I’m pushing it here, but I suppose design studio education could be a process of indoctrination into deviance; into a career of designerly deviance.
Eh…
From Chapters Three and Four:
A primary takeaway here is, of course, not about marijuana use, but about the way the author is describing the theory that he has built around his research. So far, the method was presented with an extremely light touch (the simple reference to analytic induction), and then the focus shifted to two main areas of emphasis, each given a chapter. The first was the path towards becoming a user, and the second was the way a user engaged with society around them. In both cases, a model was briefly presented (“three of these”) and then each part of the model was described in detail. Each description alternated between statements of assertion, supported by quotes, leading to an overall summary.
The description of theory development is nearly non-existent, probably because it’s boring for readers; he covers most of the theory definition in the Tricks book. The structure of a “model of three things” and “saying the same thing twice, with and without quotes” is the primary takeaway here.
From Chapter Five:
Designers have many of the same qualities described here, particularly the strange animosity that emerges between those who can design, and those who can’t. This is most vivid in a consultancy, where designers often hold the same disdain for their clients as the musicians in the example hold for their audience. Part of design school is establishing this—maybe a big part, really. As skills develop, the distinction becomes more vivid.
I wonder how the ease of making, through generative AI, will impact this; where should a designer aim their hatred? At the machine?
From Chapter Seven:
Social media has changed the nature of incentive on whistle-blowing. It is much more entrepreneurial, but localized and often grounded in values that have little to do with the actual content of the infraction; I can “get views” if I call attention to someone “being deviant” and so I might do that, even if the deviance doesn’t actually run counter to one my values.
The language the author uses about careers, business, and being entrepreneurial is interesting. I’m not sure I see the rhetorical value in that. Maybe it ties together at the end.