Deviance The Essentials

9780130941138

0130941131

As an undergraduate, I was partly drawn to sociology by studies of deviant behavior. Some of the best and most interesting academic writing I saw was in the qualitative studies of deviance I read during those years. This writing had an immediacy and truth to it that not even history, known for its interesting studies, seemed to offer. In spite of the occasional bizarre nature of the material, deviance studies were oddly reassuring. They seemed to tell the truth about the construction of unusual nooks and crannies in the social order--and they went into detail. Not even history with its grand sweep could offer this. In addition, deviance studies, and deviance theories for that matter, seemed to bring life and humanity to the issues that psychiatry and psychology also dealt with. From a deviance perspective, you could get a sense of what was in it for people to be deviant, how they put their worlds together to defend their status and self-esteem in their own minds, and how they protected themselves from the public. I was hooked on studying deviance, in short. Small wonder, then, that years later I wrote my dissertation on business deviance by psychiatric hospitals. Later, however, as a teacher of deviance, I noted that the students had changed since my undergraduate days in the late 1970s. Unlike the social critics and countercultural travelers we oftentimes were, today's students are usually more job-oriented. They're frequently destined for careers as police and probation officers, social workers, nurses, human resources officers, and any of a number of other middle-level professions. Many if not most are already working in their chosen fields, or in a preparatory position for entry into those fields. Also, chances are that some of these students would not have attended college 30 or 40 years ago, instead going immediately into technical or on-the-job training after high school. This development explains the reason forDeviance: The Essentials.It's intended as a reduced-form text, very accessible to today's students, which, at the same time, conveys some of the interesting and unusual things to be found in deviance studies. As such, it attempts to convey much of the key information that might also be found in a large-form deviance text, but in a way that economizes on reading. Since this is in no way a reader, I hope that instructors adopting this text will also adopt a book of readings as its companion. In orientation, this book tries to achieve a compromise between a pure sociology approach (in which official definitions of deviance are generally problematized) and one that is likely to be more useful for today's students, many of whom are destined for human services careers. Accordingly, "official" definitions of mental disorders are taken more seriously than they might be in more critical texts, as are those for crime. Psychiatric medications and illegal drugs are explored in greater detail, because, based on my own predoctoral experience as a human services worker, this information is eminently useful across the spectrum of social and public services, and is rarely taught. Each chapter consists of text, one vignette illustrating a form of deviance, and one or more tables or figures. A reasonable plan might be to cover one chapter a week, with one or two readings from a companion reader for illustration. This book is chiefly intended for undergraduate students of deviance in sociology and criminal justice, although it can easily be incorporated into other curricula. Interdisciplinary in nature, it can also be utilized in psychology and anthropology courses, since it illustrates psychological and biological theories as well as the sociological theories more traditional in deviance courses. It's easy to read, and can be used by all levels of college students. PLAN OF THE BOOK This book is organized in three sections.Part I, Foundations of Deviance,contains s