“OUTSIDERS”

Howard Becker  (1963)

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DEFINITIONS OF DEVIANCE

The outsider – the deviant from group rules – has been the subject of much speculation, theorizing and scientific study.  What laymen want to know about deviants is: why do they do it?  How can we account for their rule-breaking?  What is there about them that leads them to do forbidden things?  Scientific research has tried to find answers to these questions.  In doing so it has accepted the common-sense premise that there is something inherently deviant (qualitatively distinct) about acts that break (or seem to break) social rules.  It has also accepted the common-sense assumption that the deviant act occurs because some characteristic of the person who commits it makes it necessary or inevitable that he should.  Scientists do not ordinarily question the label ‘deviant’ when it is applied to particular acts or people but rather take it as given.  In so doing, they accept the values of the group making the judgment.

                It is easily observable that different groups judge different things to be deviant.  This should alert us to the possibility that the person making the judgment of deviance, the process by which that judgment is arrived at, and the situation in which it is made may all be intimately involved in the phenomenon of deviance.  To the degree that the common-sense view of deviance and the scientific theories that begin to take for granted the situations and processes of judgment, they may leave out an important variable.  If scientists ignore the variable character of the process of judgment, they may by that omission limit the kinds of theories that can be developed and the kind of understanding that can be achieved.

                Our first problem, then, is to deconstruct a definition of deviance.  Before doing this, let us consider some of the definitions scientists now use, seeing what is left out if we take them as a point of departure for the study of outsiders.

                The simplest view of deviance is essentially statistical, defining as deviant anything that varies too widely from the average. When a statistician analyzes the results of and agricultural experiment, he describes the stalk of corn that is exceptionally tall and the stalk that is exceptionally short as deviations from the mean or average.  Similarly, one can define anything that differs from what is most common as a deviation.  In this view, to be left-handed or red-headed is deviant, because most people are right-handed and brunette.

                So stated, the statistical view seems simple-minded, even trivial.  Yet it simplifies the problem by doing away with many questions of value that ordinarily arise in discussions of the nature of deviance.  In assessing any particular case, all one do is calculate the distance of the behaviour involved from the average.  But it is too simple a solution.  Hunting with such a definition, we return with a mixed-bag – people who are excessively fat or thin, murderers, redheads, homosexuals and traffic violators.  The mixture contains some ordinarily thought of as deviants and others who have broken no rule at all.  The statistical definition of deviance, in short, is too far removed from the concern with rule-breaking which prompts scientific study of outsiders.

                A less simple but much more common view of deviance identifies it as something essentially pathological, revealing the presence of a ‘disease’.  This view rests, obviously, on a medical analogy.  The human organism, when it is working efficiently and experiencing no discomfort, is said to be ‘healthy’.  When it does not work efficiently, a disease is present.  The organ or function that has become deranged is said to be pathological.  Of course, there is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the organism.  But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe kinds of behaviour that are regarded as deviant.  For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy behaviour.  Is difficult to find a definition that will satisfy even such a select and limited group as psychiatrists; it is impossible to find one that people generally accept as they accept criteria of health for the organism.  […]

                The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does.  It accepts the lay-judgment of something as deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its source within the individual, thus preventing us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial part of the phenomenon.

                Some sociologists also use a model of deviance based essentially on the medical notions of health and disease.  They look at a society, or some part of a society, and ask whether there are any processes going on in it that tend to reduce its stability, thus lessening its chance of survival.  They label such processes deviant or identify them as symptoms of social disorganization.  They discriminate between those features of society which promote stability (and thus are ‘functional’) and those which disrupt stability (and thus are ‘dysfunctional’).  Such a view has the great virtue of pointing to areas of possible trouble in a society of which people may not be aware.

                But it is harder in practice than it appears to be in theory to specify what is functional and what dysfunctional for a society or social group.  The question of what the purpose or goal (function) of a group is and, consequently, what things will help or hinder the achievement of that purpose, is very often a political question.  Factions within the group disagree and maneuver to have their own definition of the group’s function accepted.  The function of the group or organization, then, is decided on political conflict, not given in the nature of the organization.  If this is true, then it is likewise true that the questions of what rules are to be enforced, what behaviour regarded as deviant, and which people labeled as outsiders must also be regarded as political.  The functional view of deviance, by ignoring the political aspects of the phenomenon, limits our understanding.

                Another sociological view is more relativistic.  It identifies deviance as the failure to obey group rules.  Once we have described the rules a group enforces on its members, we can say with some precision whether or not a person has violated them, and is thus, on this view, deviant.

                This view is closest to my own, but it fails to give sufficient weight to the ambiguities that arise in deciding which rules are to be taken as the yardstick against which behaviour is measured and judged deviant.  A society has many groups, each with its own set of rules, and people belong to many groups simultaneously.  A person may break the rules of one group by the very act of abiding by the rules of another group.  Is he, then, deviant?  Proponents of this definition may object that while ambiguity may arise with respect to the rules peculiar to one or another group in society, there are some rules that are very generally agreed to by everyone, in which case the difficulty does not arise.  This, of course, is a question of fact, to be settled by empirical research.  I doubt there are many such areas of consensus and think it wiser to use a definition that allows us to deal with both ambiguous and unambiguous situations.

DEVIANCE AND THE RESPONSE OF OTHERS

The sociological view I have just discussed defines deviance as the infraction of some agreed-upon rule.  It then goes on to ask who breaks rules, and to search for the factors in their personalities and life situations that might account for the infractions.  This assumes that those who have broken a rule constitute a homogeneous category, because they have committed the same deviant act.

                Such an assumption seems to me to ignore the central fact about deviance: it is created by society.  I do not mean this in the way it is ordinarily understood, in which the causes of deviance are located in the social situation of the deviant or in ‘social factors’ which prompt his action.  I mean, rather, that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders.  From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’.  The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.  […]

                If we take as the attention behaviour which comes to be labelled as deviant, we must recognized that we cannot know whether a given act will be categorized as deviant until the response of others has occurred.  Deviance is not a quality that lies in behaviour itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it.

WHOSE RULES?

I have been using the term ‘outsiders’ to refer to those people who are judged by others to be deviant and thus to stand outside the circle of ‘normal’ members of the group.  But the term contains a second meaning, whose analysis leads to another important set of sociological problems: ‘outsiders’, from the point of view of the person who is labelled deviant, may be the people who make the rules he had been found guilty of breaking.

                Social rules are the creation of specific social groups.  Modern societies are not simple organizations in which everyone agrees on what the rules are and how they are to be applied in specific situations.  They are, instead, highly differentiated along social class lines, ethnic lines, occupational lines, and cultural lines.  These groups need not and, in fact, often do not share the same rules.  The problems they face in dealing with their environment.

                Social rules are the creation of specific social groups.  Modern societies are not simple organizations in which everyone agrees on what the rules are and how they are to be applied in specific situations.  They are, instead, highly differentiated along social class lines, ethnic lines, occupational lines, and cultural lines.  These groups need not and, in fact, often do not share the same rules.  The problems they face in dealing with their environment, the history and traditions they carry with them, all lead to the evolution of different sets of rules.  In so far as the rules of various groups conflict and contradict each other, there will be disagreement about the kind of behaviour that is proper in any given situation.

                Italian immigrants who went on making wine for themselves and their friends during Prohibition were acting properly by Italian immigrant standards, but were breaking the law of their new country (as, of course, were many of their Old American neighbours).  Medical patients who shop around for a doctor may, from the perspective of their own group, be making sure they do what is necessary to protect their health by making sure they get what seems to them the best possible doctor; but, from the perspective of the physician, what they do is wrong because it breaks down the trust the patient ought to put in his physician.  The lower-class delinquent who fights for his ‘turf’ is only doing what he considers necessary and right, but teachers, social workers, and police see it differently.

                While it may be argued that many or most rules are generally agreed to by all members of a society, empirical research on a given rule generally reveals variations in people’s attitudes.  Formal rules, enforced by some specially constituted group, may differ from those actually thought appropriate by most people.  Factions in a group may disagree on what I have called actual operating rules.  Most important for the study of behaviour ordinarily labelled deviant, the perspectives of the people who engage in the behaviour are likely to be quite different from those of the people who condemn it.  In this latter situation, a person may feel that he is being judged according to rules he has had no hand in making and does not accept, rules forced on him by outsiders.

                To what extent and under what circumstances do people attempt to force their rules on others who do not subscribe to them?  Let us distinguish two cases.  In the first, only those who are actually members of the group have any interest in making and enforcing certain rules.  If an orthodox Jew disobeys the laws of kashruth only other orthodox Jews will consider this as a transgression; Christians or non-orthodox Jews will not consider this deviance and would have no interest in interfering.  In the second case, members of a group consider it important to their welfare that members of certain other groups obey certain rules.  Thus, people consider it extremely important that those who practice the healing arts abide by certain rules; this is the reason the state licences physicians, nurses, and others, and forbids anyone who is not licenced to engage in healing activities.

                To the extent that a group tries to impose its rules on other groups in the society, we are presented with a second question: Who can, in fact, force others to accept their rules and what are the causes of their success?  This is, of course, a question of political and economical power.  […] [P]eople are in fact always forcing their rules on others, applying them more or less against the will and without the consent of those others.  By and large, for example, rules are made for young people by their elders.  Though the youth of this country exert a powerful influence culturally – the mass media of communication are tailored to their interests, for instance – many important kinds of rules are made for our youth by adults.  Rules regarding school attendance and sex behaviour are not drawn up with regard to the problems of adolescence.  Rather, adolescents find themselves surrounded by rules about these matters which have been made by older and more settled people.  It is considered legitimate to do this, for youngsters are considered neither wise enough nor responsible enough to make proper rules for themselves.

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