The Distinction Between Behavior and Its Designation

The central sociological claim about deviance is deceptively simple: an act does not become deviant because of its intrinsic properties. It becomes deviant when it is so designated by a social group with the power to make the designation stick. This claim, which at first sounds like a play on words, turns out to reorganize the entire field of inquiry. It moves the analytical center of gravity from the behavior of rule-breakers to the activity of rule-making — and from the properties of acts to the social processes through which acts come to count as violations in the first place.

The starting point, as with so much of the sociology of morality, is Durkheim. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim argued that the definition of crime is not given by any fixed property of the behavior. What is criminal in one society is tolerated or even required in another. The common element across all societies is not a substantive content but a formal relation: crime is whatever offends strong, well-defined states of the collective conscience (Durkheim 1895, pp. 73-74). The offense is the sociological fact; the particular act that happens to carry it is contingent. On this view, societies do not have crime because certain acts are inherently wrong; societies have crime because they have collective sentiments that are offended by specific acts, and the identity of those acts varies with the structure and history of the society in question.

A second Durkheimian provocation follows directly. If crime is whatever offends the collective conscience, then crime is a normal — not pathological — feature of social life. Every society draws a boundary, and every society has members who cross it. If the most serious offenses were abolished tomorrow, lesser ones would be elevated to take their place, because the function of crime is to mark the outer limit of what the society considers acceptable (Durkheim 1895, pp. 67-68). The argument unsettled Durkheim's contemporaries and still unsettles students on first encounter. It is not a claim that crime is good or harmless. It is a claim that the existence of a category of crime, and the ritual of its punishment, is constitutive of the moral community itself.

The cross-cultural and historical record bears out the variability Durkheim emphasized. Sumptuary laws across early modern Europe criminalized dress and consumption that modern societies regard as matters of taste. Sexual acts treated as serious crimes in one century have been decriminalized in the next; acts ignored in one century have later been criminalized. Definitions of madness have shifted with each edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, with consequences for involuntary commitment, legal responsibility, and the boundary between medical and criminal response. Drug prohibitions of the twentieth century criminalized substances long consumed legally, while ending alcohol prohibition in 1933 returned a widely consumed substance to legal status within a single generation. The acts themselves did not change; the social designation of them did.

The point is not that every behavior is equally eligible to be labeled deviant. Societies do not simply invent categories at random. But they also do not simply read categories off the intrinsic features of acts. Between the behavior and its designation stands a social process — contested, historically specific, and often bound up with the distribution of power (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, pp. 72-76). Understanding that process, rather than cataloguing the behaviors themselves, is the sociological task. It is what distinguishes a sociology of deviance from a moralistic inventory of wrongs.

This topic develops that claim across six moves. We begin with the labeling tradition's formulation of the core problem, then examine the empirical unevenness of labeling, the cyclical dynamics of moral panics, the historical construction of specific crime categories, and finally the tensions that the constructionist position must manage if it is to remain an analytical tool rather than a rhetorical stance.