UNDERSTANDING DEVIANCE: A GUIDE TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF CRIME AND RULE BREAKING by David Downes and Paul Rock. 3rd edition; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ix + 425 pp. Paper $24.95. ISBN 0-19-876533-9.

 Reviewed by Paul Lermack, Bradley University. Email: Pnl@bradley.bradley.edu.

 Sociologists define "deviance" as behavior that is undesirable in relation to social norms and assume that they can explain it by using social variables. Thus, "deviant" is to a sociologist what "mutant" is to a biologist who studies genetics, or what "psychotic" is to a psychologist. If we know nothing else about the concept, we know that through the years an enormous amount of behavior has been so labeled. The various labelers do not define deviance in the same way. Indeed, they invariably disagree with each other over the scope of the concept and the policy implications of its use. Downes and Rock, professors respectively of social policy and social institutions at the London School of Economics, have attempted to chronicle and explain this history of disagreement.

In this third edition of a popular sociological theory textbook, the authors reinforce the graduate school observation that in contrast to political science, a field in which vast amounts of data accumulate without being organized by theory, sociology is a discipline in which numerous well-articulated theories struggle to explain small amounts of shopworn data. The various sociological theories arise from different perspectives on the world, and they may reflect differing value systems or metaphysical assumptions. They cannot be reconciled with each other for the same reason that differences between religions cannot be harmonized by reason.

The authors set out to present and assess the use, by each of the important theoretical schools, of the concept of deviance. The comprehensiveness and rhetorical level are suitable for upper-level undergraduate courses in sociological theory. They do not argue for the truth of any one theory; to the contrary, they argue that students can learn most effectively when they embrace, rather than reject, the field’s diversity. By studying theories in context, they can understand the social problems that interested each theorist and the social constraints he or she was working under. By comparing theories with each other, they can learn to appreciate the uses and limits of each.

Thus, this book is not an attempt to use data to understand deviance as a phenomenon. Rather, as the subtitle suggests, it is a tour of the various theoretical schools, using deviance as the key study variable to illustrate both the differences between them and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Downes and Rock proceed chronologically (p. 57), beginning with the University of Chicago sociologists who first attempted rigorous analysis of the social phenomena which writers like Henry Mayhew and Daniel Defoe had long been describing unsystematically. Whatever their ultimate successes or failures, Small, Park and the other Chicago school sociologists firmly established the university as the location for systematic social research before 1930. By doing so, they separated sociology, with its leisurely rumination, from journalism and literature. But they also isolated it. By adopting an academic rhetorical style that was already beginning to show signs of that murkiness that Talcott Parsons would darken and blur until it was catastrophically opaque, the Chicago school made it hard for ordinary citizens to follow their work.

Park and others studied "urban ecology," the ways in which people relate to each other in cities. They observed that different behavior predominated in different urban locations. "Social problems" like crime, prostitution and mental illness were found mostly in "zones of transition," in which commercial uses were spreading, housing was deteriorating, and social bonds were weakening. They concluded that social problems were caused by this increasing disorganization. "Deviance" was thus explained as the result of moral and geographic distance from stabilizing social institutions. Some believed that the forms of deviance could be studied as adaptive responses to the weakening of religion, law and even political machines. Others, however, argued that deviance was always dysfunctional. Still others thought that dysfunctional deviance, if caught in time, could be channeled into socially desirable behavior. Unemployed youths, for example, could be redirected from gang warfare to sports.

By suggesting this possibility, the Chicago school moved from theorizing about social organization through explaining a phenomenon--deviance--to making prescriptions about political goals. The authors go on to describe, in a chapter each, the same three activities for the theoretical schools of functionalism, anomie, subcultural determinism, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, control theory, radical criminology and feminist criminology. These are not the only twentieth-century schools. They seem to have been selected because deviance represents, for each of them, a major interest, a critical case, or an important explanatory variable.

After cautioning readers about the contingent or suspect nature of much of the data available to theorists, Downes and Rock allow each school to refer to some of its data. One reason why sociologists often seem to have little data may be that a great range of subjects must be covered without the resources to study them all exhaustively. Mental illness, juvenile delinquency, penology, cheating on exams, substance abuse, spousal abuse, efforts to control behavior through magic, motorcycle helmet law protests, bullying behavior, police brutality and malingering among factory workers are all described, along with many other human activities, in the various studies of "deviance" footnoted here. Perhaps different theorists conceive of deviance differently because they are looking for it in different places.

A running theme in UNDERSTANDING DEVIANCE, and one which makes it especially valuable to interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in the relationship between theory and public policy, is that there are political consequences to emphasizing one theory over another. The government’s approach to, say, prostitution will be different if leaders assume that it plays some role in buttressing the social order (as functionalism postulates) than it will be if they assume that it represents a breakdown in society’s efforts to maintain a necessary sexual conformity (as control theory stipulates). Downes and Rock insist that the proper question to ask is not, "Which theorist is right?" but rather, "What can theory A be used for?" or "When should we resort to theory B?" The enormous variety of sociological theory presented suggests the possibility that the supporters of even the most bizarre proposals for social reform will be able to find some sort of academic support.

This possibility is so troubling that it is disappointing that the authors are too evenhanded to answer another interesting set of questions: Who decides, in a policy dispute, which theory to use? Should the decision be made by sociologists? Most, if the authors are correct, are members of competing schools. They have axes to grind, and we can hardly expect them to be as fair minded as Downes and Rock. Or should the decisions be made by political leaders? If the latter, how much social theory should we expect each leader to have read (in its full Teutonic rhetorical splendor) before we allow his or her participation in the decision making? The authors tackle these questions in their penultimate chapter. They discuss examples of sociological influence on public projects. But, evenhanded to the end, they focus mainly on describing what each theoretical school has concluded about the proper relationship between academics and policy makers.

Downes and Rock write clearly and forcefully. They respect the theorists whose ideas they present, fairly setting out, so far as I can tell, the concerns and priorities of each of them. They also present, for each scholarly school, the criticisms of that school’s opponents. Indeed, the book can be read as a history of the scholarly disputes of the twentieth century. The locutions are British. Undergraduates may find the occasional references to British political cases unfamiliar.

In the new third edition, the authors have brought references up to date and re-allocated space to better reflect contemporary ideas about what is important or cutting-edge. In a final chapter, new to this edition, they defend the concept of deviance against recent scholars who have argued that it is exhausted, out of date or inappropriate for use with new perspectives in social theory.

Copyright 1995