Is the Sociology of Deviance

Still Relevant?
ERICH GOODE

This paper discusses whether and to what extent the field of the sociology of deviance is
"dead," relevant to sociology generally, or intellectually vital, and, if it is less vital than it
once was, how and why it declined in vigor, and what might be done to return it to its glory
days. It also addresses the implicationsof the election of 2004 for the field of deviance studies.
For more than 30 years I've been struggling with what seems to me to be a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, I see evidence everywhere of the central importance o f the
deviance concept. Now, as an aside, I admit this probably illustrates the principle that, to
a herring merchant, everything is fish, or, as C. Wright Mills once said, to a shoemaker,
everything is leather. Still, to me, it seems everything is deviance. But, in spite o f the
ubiquity o f manifestations o f deviance I see all around me, the very legitimacy o f the
concept has had more than its share of critics. And for more than a decade, sociological
pundits have been proclaiming the "death" o f the sociology of deviance (Sumner, 1994);
or, even more grandly, "the death o f deviance" (Miller, Wright, and Dannels, 2001), as if
such a thing were possible. From time to time I've put in my two cents, writing articles
explaining why this development has not and cannot come to pass (2002, 2003, 2004).
But still, the critics pay no heed to me, and continue to issue their pronunciamentos.
The Politics of Deviance versus The Politics of Deviance

Not long ago, a sociologist named Anne Hendershott published a book entitled The
Politics of Deviance (2002). When I stumbled across the title, I became very excited. As
I said, I've been obsessed with the subject of deviance for decades, and for me the central issue has always been "the politics o f deviance." I ' m interested in how definitions o f
fight and wrong are established and maintained, how collectivities in every society struggle
over notions o f what is to be demarcated as acceptable and unacceptable behavior, beliefs, and even physical traits; what and who will be stigmatized; what and who will be
honored and respected, what and who will be ignored, accepted, tolerated, and condoned.
Erich Goode is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and
senior research scientist in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author often books, mainly on drug use and deviant behavior, a recipient of
several teaching awards, and a winner of the Guggenheim fellowship.

46

The American Sociologist / Winter 2004

What and who will be regarded as emblematic of the society as a whole, and what and
who will be relegated to the margins, emblematic only of the society's periphery--not
entirely respectable, exemplary, or reputable. What views win out in this struggle that
Edwin Schur--in his book of the same title, The Politics of Deviance (1980)--refers to
as "stigma contests." In the words of Stephen Pfohl: "The story of deviance and social
control is a battle story. It is a story of the battle to control the ways people think, feel,
and behave. It is a story of winners and losers and of the strategies people use in struggles
with one another. Winners in the battle to control 'deviant acts' are crowned with a halo
of goodness, acceptability, normality. Losers are viewed as living outside the boundaries
of social life as it ought to be, outside the 'common sense' of society itself" (1994: 3).
As I see it, the central idea in the sociology of deviance is that definitions of right and
wrong do not drop from the skies. They are not preordained. They are humanly produced, constructed as a result of clashes of ideologies, interests---economic, social, cultural, political--the outcome of struggles between and among categories in the society,
each vying for dominance, or at least acceptance, of the views and behaviors that characterize them as a social entity. So Hendershott's book, I thought, would offer a full,
detailed, and systematic exposition of a perspective I had been thinking, talking, writing,
and teaching about for some time.
I was in for quite a shock. Hendershott's book had nothing to do with what I thought
it was about. In fact, it argued precisely the opposite position from my own: that deviance is preordained, does drop down from the skies, should not be thought of as constructed or relative to time and place--but absolute. I read the book in horror. I was
hurled back into the nineteenth century, into a Platonic or Manichean absolutistic world
of light and darkness.
As an aside, one of her claims was easily dispensed with: that no one wants to teach
courses in deviance any more, because the field "died" a generation ago. So I checked
the enrollments in 20 more or less representative sociology departments, and found,
when I compared the 1970s with the 2000s, more departments today are offering a course
in deviance during any given semester than was true 30 years ago, and about the same
number of students are taking the course per semester for a given department. I also
checked the sociology curricula at 25 major universities across the country, and found
that the majority, two-thirds (or 16), do currently offer a course in deviance (2003).
Clearly, that aspect of her claim, that the field had "died," at least with respect to course
offerings and enrollments, was completely false, simply a fantasy on her part.
Hendershott's argument, in a nutshell, begins with the fact that sociology's founding
fathers--Durkheim being a clear example--were guided by a firm moral compass. They
recognized that some behaviors are harmful and should be condemned--that is, should
be regarded as deviant. But the 1960s, Hendershott argues, marked a radical break with
this traditional idea. Beginning with Becker and his ilk, she asserts, practitioners of the
sociology of deviance argued for a kind of moral relativism that recognized no intrinsically evil deeds, only a marketplace of competing claims, each jostling for acceptance.
Deviants should be condemned and stigmatized, Hendershott believes. Along these lines,
then, she rails: against medicalizing the deviance of drug use and abuse; against removing the stigma from mental illness; against the "postmodern" normalization of pedophilia; against the removal of stigma against flamboyant and militant gays (and, by implication, against gays generally); against "celebrating the sexually adventurous [that is
to say, "promiscuous"] adolescent"; and against downgrading the deviance of assisted suicide. As a result of the efforts of brave souls such as herself, Hendershott asserts, the

Goode

47

pendulum is beginning to swing back once again. The concept of deviance, she says: "is
being rediscovered by ordinary people who have suffered the real-world consequences
of the academic elite's rejection of the concept. Those whose communities have been
broken apart by failed welfare policies, or whose families have fallen apart as a result of
teenage pregnancy or divorce, are now speaking out about the moral chaos that is destroying their neighborhoods, their schools and their families" (p. 10).
The idea of deviance, she claims, before Howard Becker and the labeling theorists
came along, was that it was tragically, perniciously harmful behavior, behavior that tore
at the fabric of the society, undermined the social order, wreaked havoc on the community. Becker and his colleagues (1963, 1964) have warped, distorted, and poisoned the
deviance notion, Hendershott argues--took the moral taint out of it, removed it from the
negative valuation it so richly deserves--relativized it, made it impossible for us to say
that deviance really means bad, evil, morally wrong. Sociologists have the right--indeed, the obligation--to condemn deviance, she says, and encourage their students and
the general public to do so, too.
It was Becker's relativity, Hendershott claims, that killed off the concept that had
previously led ordinary people to see that it was immoral, harmful, contrary to natural
law and common sense. In opposition to the thesis of the moral relativists, she says, we
must "draw from nature, reason and common sense to define what is deviant and reaffirm the moral ties that bind us together" (p. 11). In other words, Hendershott wants to
de-relativize, essentialize, and absolutize deviance. In print, I said a few unkind things
about her book (2003: 523-530), and then filed it away in some bin in my mind somewhere as the ravings of a right-wing ideologue, and went about my business.
The Election of 2004

Then along came the election of 2004.

In the days following November third, in a communication with Nachman Ben-Yehuda,
an Israeli sociologist, I tried to explain the presidential election to him. He in turn told
me the Israeli newspapers pointed out that the decisive equation in the election was that
a substantial percentage of the population was brought into the polling booth because of
their fear of and hatred for gays, especially for gay marriage, which helped Bush win.
Then he said: "Maybe those Republicans will help bring deviance back into the center of
things."
Anne Hendershott, I realized, was right! (At least about the importance of conventional morality.) She precisely captured the mood of a substantial segment of the ultraconservative fringe of the Republican Party who seek to use traditional values to condemn unconventional behavior. In other words, the 2004 election transformed Anne
Hendershott in my mind from a crackbrained lunatic, spouting silly ideas I felt I was
forced to critique, to a harbinger, a flagbearer of a particular perspective, that, while not
widespread in academic sociology, does reflect the mood and thinking of a substantial
segment of American society. And in this formulation, opposition to homosexuality, in
the guise of hostility toward gay marriage, became one fulcrum of the affirmation of
traditional institutions and practices, while opposition to abortion became the other. All
encapsulated in the term "moral values." Or, even a shade more coded, "family values."
Both of which in turn became code words for condemning sexual activity outside of

heterosexual marriage.

48

The American Sociologist / Winter 2004

According to a Washington Post poll, among voters for whom the issue of "moral
values" was important, 80% voted for Bush. More than 40% of Bush's supporters were
white, born-again Christians, as opposed to only 22% of the electorate as a whole (Finkel,
2004). I realize that pundits supporting Bush argue against the position I'm spelling out
because they don't want it to seem as if the president was reelected by a bunch of yahoos
from the boonies (Krauthammer, 2004). But to me, the evidence seems quite convincing. It was Bush who thanked the crowds for their prayers. While Kerry talked about a
woman's right to choose, it was Bush who talked about "family values" and "moral
values," again, code for conventional sexual practices, i.e., sex blessed by the sanctity of
marriage. During the campaign, Bush even used the term the "culture of life," implying
that Kerry favored a "culture of death."
It was specifically those states and those social categories where anti-abortion and
anti-gay sentiment was the strongest which Bush carried. Though obviously, the "moral
values" issue wasn't the only one in this election, it was to a substantial segment of the
electorate, and it was the vote of that segment that carried the president to victory in
several key states. While the issue of homosexuality did not need to be explicitly spelled
out in the presidential races--except for Kerry mentioning the fact that Dick Cheney's
daughter is a lesbian--it was fought over in state elections. Some form of ban on gay
marriage was on the ballot in 11 states, and in all 11 states, the legislation passed. Tom
Coburn, the winning Republican senatorial candidate from Oklahoma, claimed that:
"lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeastern Oklahoma that they'll
only let one girl go to the bathroom [at a time]. Now think about that issue," Coburn
added. "How is it that that's happened to us?" That phrase, "that's happened to us,"
encapsulates the fear of a substantial proportion of some corners of this society in the
early years of the twenty-first century, the fear that deviant behavior is becoming more
common and socially acceptable. Coburn also advocated the death penalty for abortion
doctors, a position not widely shared even among the electorate of Oklahoma, but one, if
expressed by a winning senatorial candidate, nonetheless should give us thought about
the mood of the public in some areas. Let me say, so-called "moral values" did not
constitute fulcrum issues in the so-called "blue" or "metro" states of the West Coast, the
upper Great Lakes, or the Northeast--they had very little resonance there--but they
were hugely important, perhaps even pivotal issues, in several battleground "red" or
"retro" states of the South, Midwest, and Rocky Mountain regions.
Here we see on the national canvas the importance of definitions of deviance--of
notions of conventional morality--being fought out in the presidential race. And they
are likely to play themselves out over the course of the next four years, or more, in those
states in which these issues are very much alive, in the form of legislation and court
decisions and very possibly as a consequence, personal stigma for gays and women who
seek an abortion. And with the election of George Bush, R o e v. Wade will be under
attack over the next four years. And in a variety of ways, in much of the country, homosexuality, which prior to 2004 had been "departing from deviance" (Minton, 2002; Goode,
2005: 238-246), may very well come to be regarded as more deviant when Bush leaves
office than when he was reelected.
Without becoming self-righteous or preachy about it, for many of our fellow citizens,
the outcome of the election may in the near future make a difference between being denied
legal rights and having legal rights, between deviance and conventionality, between stigma
and respectability. And the election forced me to ask, in a somewhat belligerent fashion:

Goode

49

Who says the topic of deviance is irrelevant, dead, or unimportant? A defensive position, I agree, but one born of years of thinking about such issues.
The Trajectory of the Deviance Concept

How had it come to this? I wondered.

The dramatic relevance of the deviance concept in the 2004 campaign, combined
with the continued drumbeat of claims that the field of the sociology of deviance is
"dead" or at least ailing, forced me to rethink the foundation and the history of the field.
As a field of study, and as I define it, the sociology of deviance is, as sociological
subfields go, fairly young. As conceived of as a normative violation that tends to generate negative reactions, the contemporary notion of deviance is only a bit more than half
a century old, born, as it was, from a clearly-articulated definition in the work of Edwin
Lemert (1948, 1951). But in spite of the publication of a major, mainstream textbook in
1957 (Clinard, 1957), the field remained a stodgy, not especially exciting younger brother
or sister of the larger field of social problems until 1963 and 1964, when Howard S.
Becker published his collection of essays, Outsiders, and his anthology, The Other Side.
These books jet-propelled the field of the sociology of deviance into the limelight of
academic prominence, made it seem exciting, a fresh, novel, almost revolutionary way
of looking at a newly-carved out subject. But practically from the beginning, the sociology of
deviance was the target of criticism, some of it savage and denunciatory. As we know,
the price of academic prominence is attracting critics, and beginning in the 1960s, and
increasingly throughout the 1970s, the field attracted a lively and spirited host of critiques.
Probably the first of such critiques, by Alvin Gouldner, appeared in 1968; it attacked
Howard Becker and his school for portraying the deviant as sneaky rather than defiant,
and for not taking sides in defending the underdog against the corporate elite. Four years
later, Alexander Liazos condemned the practitioners of the field for concentrating on
"nuts, sluts, and deviated preverts," and for ignoring the corporate and high crimes and
misdemeanors of the rich and powerful. In short, in the full flush of its initial influence
and popularity, the sociology of deviance was under assault. These opening salvos argued that the field was biased and the concept on which it was based, illegitimate, in
effect, premised on fatally flawed assumptions. But the most recent attacks have argued
that both field and concept have already met their demise, that they are in fact "dead."
Anne Hendershott's screed is far from unique. In 1994, Colin Sumner, approaching
the issue from a radical perspective, wrote a volume-length "obituary" for the sociology
of deviance. The field arose, Sumner argues, as a mechanism of social control, to defend
the interests of the rich and powerful. Given the diversity that prevails today, he says, the
field no longer serves the purpose of keeping wrongdoing in check. Polished offby the
critiques of radicals, "critical" theorists, and the "new" criminologists, the sociology of
deviance is now a corpse.
These recent statements proclaiming the "death" of the sociology of deviance cry out
for an evaluation of the claim. Miller, Wright, and Dannels (2001), test the "death"
proposition with the use of citations, which indicate that roughly half those in the deviance literature are to works by criminologists (Miller, Wright, and Dannels, 2001). And
that among the most frequently cited works in the deviance literature, relatively few are
recent (Miller, Wright, and Dannels, 2001). These two findings, the authors conclude,
indicate that the field of deviance is less theoretically innovative than it was in the past.
The field, they say, while not yet "dead," is less intellectually vital than it was in its

50

The American Sociologist / Winter 2004

heyday in the 1970s. Joel Best agrees; in a slim, book-length study on the "trajectory" of
the "career" of the deviance concept (2004), concludes the field that studies it is, again,
not yet dead--but it is not thriving either. Fewer articles bearing the word "deviance" in
their titles, he found, were published in the 1990s in the field's leading journals, the
American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces,
than was true ten or 20 years prior (Best, 2004: ix-xi). On the other hand, in Creating
Deviance, what he describes as a postmodernist text on the sociology of deviance (2004),
Daniel Dotter refers to the "death" claim as an "obituary absent a demise" (pp. 2772 7 8 ) - - a brilliant phrase, in my estimation.
So, is the sociology of deviance "dead"--or not? Is it "thriving"--or not? Is it still
relevant to the sociologist--or not?
What I've done is a little counting exercise to get some sense of the popularity of the
deviance concept. I obtained a print-out of the titles of the 200-plus books in the University of Maryland library with the word "deviance" or "deviant" in their titles, and the
1,600-plus articles published in academic (and a few non-academic)journals indexed by
the Social Science Citation Index, again, with the terms "deviance" or "deviant" in their
titles. Obviously, I eliminated those titles that used the term in a non-sociological way,
for instance, if it referred to a statistical or engineering concept, I deleted it.
Articles and books are published in a given area for many reasons. Obviously, the
publication in a given year of an article or book reflects research activities that were
ongoing two to five years before the year of a publication. Publications and citations are
not a perfect reflection of a field's intellectual activity. But when a field becomes irrelevant, nobody talks or writes about it. Even when a field is under attack, if it's a phenomenon of note, it will be talked and written about.
The University of Maryland library has no books with the word "deviance" in the title
published before 1960, but 12 that were published in the 1960s, including two designed
as textbooks, and three anthologies, also indicated for classroom use. In addition, the
Table 1

Works with "Deviance" or "Deviant" in the Title, by Decade

A R T I C L E S (listed in SSCI)
Decade

Total
Number

Number
per Year

1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2000
2001
2002
2003
Total N:

3
129
404
528
423
141
37
40
31
33
1628

0.3
12.0
40.4
52.8
42.3
35.2
37
40
31
33
202

Source: Social Science Citation Index

B O O K S (in UM library)
Decade

1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s

Total
Number
Number per Year

0
12
73
55
44
18

0
1.2
7.3
5.5
4.4
4.5

Source:Universityof MarylandLibrary.

Note: All works with a non-sociological meaning have been eliminated.

Goode

51

journal literature manifests a similarly dramatic leap in interest in the field of deviance:
Among the titles of the articles published in the academic journals indexed by the Social
Science Citation Index that include the words "deviance" or "deviant," only three were
published in the 1950s, but 129 were published in the 1960s. So, clearly, by the 1960s,
the field had arrived as an academic discipline. In other words, interest in the field grew
substantially between the 1950s and the 1960s, disproportionate, I'd guess, to the growth
of academia generally, and even to the growth of sociology specifically. In any case, the
number of book titles grew from 12 in the 1960s to 73 in the 1970s, and the number of
articles with deviance in the title indexed in the Social Science Citation Index, jumped
again from 12 per year in the 1960s to 40 per year in the 1970s. Clearly, by the 1970s, the
subject had become hugely important in sociology. It was talked about, written about,
researched, critiqued, attacked; it had become an intellectual phenomenon of note.
Now, Sumner dates the demise of the sociology of deviance at 1975, that is, after
Gouldner's 1968 critique, Liazos' 1972 critique, and the appearance of two books by
British criminologists Taylor, Walton, and Young in 1973 and 1975, which attacked the
field from a radical or Marxist perspective. But it's not clear what Sumner means by
"death," since he admits that studies are still being conducted and books are still being
written under the field's umbrella. And what I found was the decade after the decade he
selects as the era of the field's demise--that is, in the 1980s--the number of articles on
deviance grew enormously. With respect to articles, the 1980s turns out to have been the
heyday of the sociology of deviance, with over 50 published each year on the subject.
Even more embarrassing for Sumner's argument, there were more articles published in
the 1990s bearing the word "deviance" in the title than there were in the 1970s, indicating that Sumner's "obituary" for the field for 1975 was a bit premature. Even in the
2000s, the field seems to be going strong, with respect to both books and articles. Clearly,
the field of the sociology of deviance is not "dead" in the sense that no one talks or
writes about it, or conducts research within its parameters.
As I said, students are taking courses in deviance. And textbooks bearing the title
"deviance" for these courses seem to be selling well. And these textbooks, as I found out
by checking the Social Science Citation Index--my guess is, compared to texts in other
fields--receive an enormous number of citations from the field of sociology generally
(Goode, 1997). However, Joel Best says that enrollments and textbook sales, along with
popular and mass media use of the concept, are only "minimal signs of life" (2004: 84).
The questions before us then are, is the sociology of deviance a vital and vibrant part
of sociology? And is its analytical potential being realized? It's possible that sociology
in general is less vital and less innovative than it was in the past; that too is a matter to be
investigated. In any case, taking the indicators I've just alluded to, and taking my little
tally that the year-by-year number of articles and books in the 1990s and the 2000s, are
less numerous than they were in the 1970s (for books) and 1980s (for articles), we are
led to the conclusion that work in the field of deviance today is less bountiful, less
abundant, less plentiful, and if we are to trust citation figures, theoretically and conceptually less creative, innovative, influential, and vital than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
What Happened to the Sociology of Deviance?

Given these conclusions, two questions come to mind: One, what happened to the
field? And two: What would energize it?

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The American Sociologist / Winter 2004

The first question is easier to answer than the second. Our answer is partly semantic
and depends on whether we count criminology as a subfield of deviance or an altogether
separate field. If criminology is a subfield, as it seems to be treated in many deviance
textbooks--that is, deviance being the violation of an informal norm, and crime, the
violation of a formal norm, that is to say, a law--then the sociology of deviance is a
huge, thriving discipline rivaling any in sociology, one that generates oceans of theories,
concepts, ideas, and innovative studies, and millions of dollars in research revenues. If it
is a separate field, we are led to a different conclusion. The fact is, much of what falls
under the umbrella of deviance these days is detailed micro-ethnographies of the behavior of participants in particular scenes, who engage in a specific, unconventional activity. Rodeo groupies. Strip club bouncers. Men who intentionally spread HIV. Female-tomale transsexuals. Erotic tourism. People who engage in radical body transformation.
Bead whores during Mardi Gras parades. General concepts such as stigma, identity,
socialization, status, and so on, are used by the authors of these works, and are important
to their arguments, but theory testing as such tends to be rare, almost nonexistent. Most
sociologists would find these studies far too idiographic for their taste. Empirical theory
testing has for the most part been left to criminology, which has broken off and formed
its own separate field, one perhaps five times as large as the field of the sociology of
deviance. So what's left as the field of the sociology of deviance is a fragment of what
the field used to be.
And, as I said, most current deviance researchers have abandoned the traditional
etiological issues that concerned the early sociologists who looked at deviance, crime,
and delinquency--from the Chicago theorists, through Edwin Sutherland, Robert K.
Merton, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, Albert K. Cohen--and focus instead on
more or less exclusively constructionist issues, such as how deviance is socially constructed, the adoption of a deviant identity, how norm violators explain and justify their
misdeeds, how stigma is managed, and the process by which a deviant role is exited
(Adler and Adler, 2003). To be sure, some deviance researchers maintain an emphasis on
causal issues (Akers, 1998). But they are as much criminologists as deviance specialists,
and a perusal of the titles published in Deviant Behavior, as compared with those in
Criminology, will swiftly lead to the conclusion that etiology is a minor concern in the
former journal and a major concern in the latter. In other words, much of the field has
positioned itself outside the classic positivistic framework, and outside more social structural concerns. And has become much more micro, and largely symbolic interactionist.
(Let me say, as an aside, these are biases I share, but they are not mainstream sociological orientations.) The field's decline along a variety of dimensions is therefore not entirely surprising. And frankly, there is no point in attempting to reinvade the territory the
field has largely abandoned.
To raise the questions the pioneers of the field raised 50, 60, 70 years ago, at that
time, usually required some fieldwork but above all, an imaginative turn of mind. But to
definitively test the theories that were raised a half-century or more ago takes thinking
along lines that are alien to the modal contemporary sociologist of deviance, and quite
compatible with the turn of mind of the modal contemporary criminologist. In effect,
deviance specialists have abdicated to the criminologists the classic question of what
causes deviance. The fact is, the majority of the field has definitively turned away from
such concerns, and is unlikely to return to them.

Goode

53

Obliteration by Incorporation

But what has happened--and is even more interesting than the abandonment of traditional etiological concerns--is the incorporation of the field's foundational concepts
into sociology proper or into fields of study that did not exist in decades past.
For instance, consider the work ofMitch Duneier, author of Sidewalk (1999). Duneier
replicates, if not emulates, Becker's "outsider" concept by investigating men (and a few
women) who live lives on the margin of conventional society, who, like Becker's jazz
musicians and marijuana smokers, maintain their dignity and self-respect in spite of the
fact that many of the people who swirl through their lives look down their noses at them
and consider them deviants. There's an echo of Goffman's Asylums (1961) in Sidewalk
when we see Duneier's street people trying to work out a place to urinate (p. 353), or
Goffman's Stigma (1963), specifically the stigma of tribe, race, and nation (p. 4), when
Duneier himself felt that, at Hakim's table, African Americans were welcome, but he
was not (p. 20). Or Merton's concept of retreatism when a dominant feeling among
many of Duneier's subjects and informants, adopt what he calls the "fuck it" or "I don't
give a fuck" attitude (p. 61). When Cynthia Epstein talks about "Border Crossings"
(2000), she's discussing how men and women are subjected to peer disapproval, and
come to be regarded as deviants, when they transgress traditional sex role activities. Any
discussion of the war on drugs, by its very nature, incorporates concepts, such as marginality and stigmatization, that were given a prominent place in that pioneering work of
Becker, Goffman, and their peers. When Philippe Bourgois discusses adaptations inner
city Latino residents make to political and economic marginality, he's fusing conflict
theory, social disorganization, differential association, and labeling theory, all gleaned
from classic perspectives on deviance (1995).
In his discussion of citation patterns, Robert Merton refers to "obliteration by incorporation" (1979). Some ideas, once innovative, have become so taken-for-granted that it
is no longer appreciated how original they once were--hence, an "obliteration of the
source of ideas, methods, or findings by their incorporation in currently accepted knowledge." At a certain period in its history, the sociology of deviance generated or highlighted a host of interesting ideas, concepts, and theories that seeped out into, and influenced, allied fields, eventually becoming incorporated into their practitioners' thinking
about how the social world works. A few of these concepts include: stigma (which has
influenced disability and transgender studies); anomie (in social theory and sociology
generally); the contingencies of labeling (in ethnic studies); social disorganization (in
criminology); the social construction of non-hegemonic definitions of reality (in
postmodernism); the sociology of the underdog (in queer theory); the outsider or "the
other" (in postcolonialist studies); the medicalization of deviance (in the sociology of
medicine); deviance neutralization (in autoethnography and narrative studies); and moral
panics (in collective behavior, social movements, criminology, social problems, and communication studies). The sociology of deviance did not necessarily originate all of these
concepts, but the field did help catapult them onto the academic and intellectual map,
and, whether directly or indirectly, the field's discussion of them served to plant seeds
that bore fruit in other disciplines (Goode, 2002:115-116). What's likely to happen for
the foreseeable future is that researchers in other fields will continue to use concepts and
ideas once developed by deviance specialists, along the lines I suggest, but what they do
will not be called the sociology of deviance. At which point, whether and to what extent
"the field" is intellectually lively becomes, once again, a matter of semantics, not a matter of

54

The American Sociologist / Winter 2004

empirical factuality. No loss for the field of sociology, but fuel for the argument that the
sociology of deviance is "dead" or at least, ailing. And a reminder of the importance of
Merton's concept of"obliteration by incorporation."
Energizing the Sociology of Deviance?
My second question: What would reenergize the sociology of deviance, bring it back
to its former glory, reformulate a field that, once again, generates innovative concepts,
ideas, and theories that enliven the discipline of sociology and beyond? That's a lot more
difficult question to answer than the first one. The positivist-constructionist split may
very well have been fatal, in that the field is made up of two factions that are engaged in
radically different endeavors, and are tied together solely by their subject matter. The
field's survival is secure, and the bumper sticker slogan, "the sociology of deviance is
dead," is clearly premature. But a revival of the field's intellectual vigor, in my judgment, is very much in doubt.
What could reinvigorate the field, as I see it, is forging linkages with the fields of
social movements, media studies, and political sociology, as pioneered in Howard Becker's
interest in the origin of the marijuana laws (1963:135-146), in Joseph Gusfield's research on the triumph and demise of national alcohol prohibition (1963), and Edwin
Sutherland's study of the origin and diffusion of the sexual psychopath laws (1950a,
1950b). By bringing social structure and power into the deviance equation, taking a page
from Philip Jenkins' book on the 1990s panic over designer drugs (1999), and the ever
historically changing conceptions of the child molester (1998); from James Gilbert's
study of America's reaction to the juvenile delinquent in the 1950s (1986); from Jeffrey
Victor's investigation of the panic over satanic ritual abuse (1993); and from Best's studies of social definitions of random violence (1999).
It seems clear to me that, unless harnessed to major prepossessing theoretical concerns, micro-ethnographic studies of small, esoteric scenes cannot energize the field.
The field's practitioners have to march up the ladder of generality, not down, as they now
seem to be doing. Moreover, this tiny, under-funded field cannot compete with criminology, a much larger and more richly endowed discipline, in positivistic questing after the
causes of deviance. Instead, I suggest, the field should follow Edwin Schur's lead and
regard deviance as a dimension of Weber's class, status, and power, and in so doing, try
to understand how some definitions of definitions of deviance and respectability win
out over others. I don't hold out any hope that this will happen any time soon---or ever,
for that matter. So many deviant scenes, so little time, I suppose.
And thus, we come full circle, back to Dr. Hendershott. One task for the ruling elite in
any society is to make its hegemonic institutions seem natural, pregiven, essentialistic
realities, and to make questioning, subverting, or artificializing them, analyzing them as
social institutions rather than god-given in nature, an unacceptable, unholy, practice, as
Stephen Pfohl says, an enterprise beyond the pale of reason and common sense. The idea
that the social definition of deviance is contingent on time, place, and social context,
was a revolutionary way of thinking about the subject. But after the sixties, in the field
of the sociology of deviance and beyond, it became taken-for-granted, a component in
any deviance specialist's conceptual tool-kit.
But that very notion--the radical idea of relativism--came under attack not only
from conservatives and traditional positivists, but, as I said, from Marxists, would-be
revolutionaries, and critical theorists. If the extant social structure can be made to seem

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a social construction, so can ideas o f justice, freedom, exploitation, and oppression. This
is not the place to resurrect the debates that raged in the sixties and seventies between
symbolic interactionists. Suffice it to say that the Anne Hendershotts o f the world influence the lives o f academics a lot more than we'd like to admit. In budgetary support for
our universities. In approval or denial o f research f u n d i n g - - l o o k i n g at the history o f the
national sex survey run by Edward Laumann and John Gagnon's research team at the
University o f Chicago shows that the political powers that be can shut down federal
funding for controversial research (Michael et al., 1994: 28). In the well-being o f our
students, some o f w h o m are gay, some o f whom are women seeking abortions, others o f
w h o m are engaged in activities that are defined in some quarters not only as deviant but
as unnatural and contrary to eternal law.
M y friend Nachman was being insightful when he said that the conservatives have
brought deviance back into the center o f things. The social construction o f deviance is
no longer an idea we can take for granted and move on to other things. It is once again
controversial, relevant, central to our lives, and fundamental to our understanding o f a
nation that has just elected a president who believes G o d told him to run for office. The
next four years, to quote a well-known Chinese saying, should be "interesting times."

Note
This is the revision of a talk presented at the colloquium series of the Department of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, November 19, 2004. Erich Goode is a senior research scientist at
the University of Maryland.

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