Norms and the study of deviance: A proposed research strategy

Abstract

The study of deviance seems to have low prestige within sociology and does so at least in part because students of deviance have not shown how the study of deviance bears on wider social processes and conditions. Much of this might possibly be avoided by concentrating on the concepts that are of central concern to the study of deviance, for example, norm. Although norms constitute the central boundary separating normativist and reactivist conceptions of deviance, little conceptual and empirical attention has been devoted to them. The main problem is that norms have not been measured directly (and hence themselves not studied empirically) but have been inferred from social situations in a post hoc fashion. If norms are conceived properly, however, there exists the possibility for direct measurement. Procedures are proposed to accomplish this task.