![]() 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. 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. 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. The outsider-the deviant from group rules-has been the subject of much speculation, theorizing, and scientific study. At the extreme, some deviants (homosexuals and drug addicts are good examples) develop full-blown ideologies explaining why they are right and why those who disapprove of and punish them are wrong. Alcoholics are often ambivalent, sometimes feeling that those who judge them do not understand them and at other times agreeing that compulsive drinking is a bad thing. The traffic violator usually subscribes to the very rules he has broken. In the same way, some rule-breakers do not think they have been unjustly judged. Crimes such as murder, rape, or treason lead us to view the violator as a true outsider. We regard the thief as less like us and punish him severely. ![]() We think of the person who commits a traffic violation or gets a little too drunk at a party as being, after all, not very different from the rest of us and treat his infraction tolerantly. I shall mainly be concerned with what we can call the actual operating rules of groups, those kept alive through attempts at enforcement.įinally, just how far “outside” one is, in either of the senses I have mentioned, varies from case to case. (It is important to remember, however, that an unenforced law may be reactivated for various reasons and regain all its original force, as recently occurred with respect to the laws governing the opening of commercial establishments on Sunday in Missouri.) Informal rules may similarly die from lack of enforcement. Blue laws, which remain on the statute books though they have not been enforced for a hundred years, are examples. Many rules are not enforced and are not, in any except the most formal sense, the kind of rules with which I am concerned. Similarly, whether a rule has the force of law or tradition or is simply the result of consensus, it may be the task of some specialized body, such as the police or the committee on ethics of a professional association, to enforce it enforcement, on the other hand, may be everyone’s job or, at least, the job of everyone in the group to which the rule is meant to apply. In other cases, they represent informal agreements, newly arrived at or encrusted with the sanction of age and tradition rules of this kind are enforced by informal sanctions of various kinds. They may be formally enacted into law, and in this case the police power of the state may be used in enforcing them. Some preliminary distinctions are in order. In what follows, I will try to clarify the situation and process pointed to by this double-barrelled term: the situations of rule-breaking and rule-enforcement and the processes by which some people come to break rules and others to enforce them. Hence, a second meaning of the term emerges: the rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders. He may not accept the rule by which he is being judged and may not regard those who judge him as either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. He is regarded as an outsider.īut the person who is thus labelled an outsider may have a different view of the matter. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as “right” and forbidding others as “wrong.” When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. ![]() All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them.
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