Explain and evaluate sociological theories of deviance and crime

What this dot point is asking

Deviance is a classic sociology topic that lets you apply every perspective from Module 1. This dot point asks you to explain the main sociological theories of why people break norms and laws, and to evaluate them against one another. The key insight is that deviance is socially defined: what counts as deviant varies between societies and over time.

Deviance is socially constructed

Nothing is deviant in itself. An act becomes deviant only when a society defines it as breaking a norm. The same act, such as killing, can be murder, war or self defence depending on the social context. This means deviance is relative to time, place and culture, a point interactionists emphasise. Crime is the subset of deviance that breaks formal laws and attracts official sanctions.

Durkheim and the functions of deviance

Emile Durkheim made the surprising claim that deviance is normal and necessary. A certain level of crime exists in every society, and it performs functions: punishing offenders reaffirms shared values (boundary maintenance), and some deviance drives social change by challenging outdated norms. Durkheim also introduced anomie, a state of normlessness during rapid social change when the rules that usually restrain people break down.

Merton's strain theory

Robert Merton adapted anomie to explain crime in unequal societies. Society sets universal success goals, such as wealth, but provides unequal access to legitimate means like good jobs. This strain pushes some people toward deviant adaptations, most importantly innovation, achieving the goals through illegitimate means such as theft. Strain theory neatly links crime to inequality, but it focuses on financial crime and struggles to explain non utilitarian deviance such as vandalism.

Labelling theory

Interactionist Howard Becker argued that deviance is not a quality of the act but of the reaction to it: an act is deviant only once it is successfully labelled so. The powerful decide which acts and which people get labelled, and the labelled person may experience a self fulfilling prophecy, taking on a deviant master status and being pushed into a deviant career. This explains why official statistics reflect who gets caught and labelled, not simply who offends.

Marxist and feminist views

Marxists argue that capitalism causes crime: inequality and consumerism generate both street crime among the poor and corporate crime among the powerful, yet the law and police focus on the former while the crimes of the powerful go largely unpunished. Marxists also point to selective law enforcement, where laws protecting private property are vigorously enforced while corporate and environmental harms attract weak sanctions. Feminists point out that mainstream theories were built around male offenders and ask why women commit less recorded crime, examining how socialisation, social control and the courts treat women differently. They also study how women are treated by the justice system, sometimes more leniently in line with their conventional role and sometimes more harshly when they breach gendered expectations, a pattern known as the chivalry thesis and its critique.

Subcultural and interactionist extensions

Albert Cohen developed strain theory to explain non-utilitarian deviance, arguing that working-class boys who fail by middle-class standards experience status frustration and form delinquent subcultures that invert mainstream values, gaining status through the very acts the wider society condemns. This addresses Merton's blind spot about crime that brings no financial reward, such as vandalism. Interactionists add that the meaning of an act, and the reaction it triggers, depends on who commits it and where, which is why the same behaviour can be tolerated in one context and policed in another.

Deviance ties the course together: it draws on socialisation, social control, stratification and the perspectives, and it shows how definitions of normal behaviour change as society itself changes.