Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This was a good deviance and social control book combining theory and research articles. I used it for several years, but the publisher allowed it to go out of print and it can no longer be ordered by university bookstores. It should be brought back, or used as a model for someone else's new book--with one major change: add articles representing constructionist perspectives. It is unusual in being one of the few books in this field to use an analytical approach to social behavior consistently while avoiding the typical deviantizing approach (as in books that include a chapter on crime, one on mental illness, one on drug use, etc.).
I now use a small textbook combined with Deviance Across Cultures, edited by Robert Heiner from Oxford Press, and like the latter very much. Students find the international focus interesting. The collection highlights the socially constructed and variable nature of deviance with articles that nicely combine familiar and new.
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Conveniently divided into five comprehensive parts, Deviance and Social Control provides readers with a selection of articles that examine core issues in the field of deviant behavior and social control. Major areas covered in the book include how individuals become deviant, changes in their identities as they become increasingly involved in deviance; how deviants explain or justify their behavior; the role of the mass media in framing popular impressions of deviants; social and political conflicts over deviance and over appropriate methods of suppressing or managing deviant populations; why norms and sanctions change over time, in either a more rigid or more tolerant direction; the role of others (family, friends, strangers, police, psychiatrists, etc.) in identifying individuals who are engaged in unacceptable behavior, attaching labels to them, and discriminating against them in some fashion; and ways in which deviant actors attempt to fight back to reject stigmatization, enhance their self-esteem, and struggle for their rights. Types of deviance examined in the book include drug use and drug dealing, corporate crime, pornography, governmental deviance, rape and other violence against women, prostitution, homosexuality, cyberdeviance, AIDS, cheating among college students, transgenders, and many others.
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