Drug Abuse

10 Labelling Theory Reconsidered

This paper was first presented at the meetings of the British Sociological Association, April, 1971, in London. A number of friends provided helpful comments on an earlier draft. I especially want to thank Eliot Freidson, Blanche Geer, Irving Louis Horowitz, and John I. Kitsuse.

DEVIANT phenomena have long provided one of the foci of sociological thought. Our theoretical interest in the nature of social order combines with practical interest in actions thought harmful to individuals and society to direct our attention to the broad arena of behavior variously called crime, vice, nonconformity, aberration, eccentricity, or madness. Whether we conceive it as a failure of socialization and sanctioning or simply as wrongdoing and misbehavior, we want to know why people act in disapproved ways.

In recent years, a naturalistic approach to these phenomena (Matza, 1969) has come to center on the interaction between those alleged to be engaged in wrongdoing and those making the allegations. A number of people—Frank Tannenbaum ( 1938) , Edwin Lemert (1951 ) , John Kitsuse (1962) , Kai Erikson (1962) and myself (Becker, 1963), to name a few—contributed to the development of what has rather unfortunately been called "labelling theory." Since the initial statements, many people have criticized, extended, and argued over the original statements; others have contributed important research results.

I would like to look back on these developments and see where we stand (cf. Schur, 1969). What has been accomplished? What criticisms have been made? What changes in our conceptions must we make? Three topics especially deserve discussion: the conception of deviance as collective action; the demystification of deviance; and the moral dilemmas of deviance theory. In each case, I intend the point I make to apply to sociological research and analysis generally, reaffirming the faith that the field of deviance is nothing special, just another kind of human activity to be studied and understood.

I might begin by disposing of some seemingly difficult points rather summarily, in a way which will make clear my dissatisfaction with the expression "labelling theory." I never thought the original statements by myself and others warranted being called theories, at least not theories of the fully articulated kind they are now criticized for not being. A number of authors complained that labelling theory neither provides an etiological explanation of deviance (Gibbs, 1966; Bordua, 1967; Akers, 1968) nor tells how the people who commit deviant acts come to do that—and especially why they do it while others around them do not. Sometimes critics suggest that a theory was proposed, but that it was wrong. Thus, some thought the theory attempted to explain deviance by the responses others made to it. After one was labelled a deviant, according to this paraphrase, then one began to do deviant things, but not before. You can easily dispose of that theory by referring to facts of everyday experience.

The original proponents of the position, however, did not propose solutions to the etiological question. They had more modest aims. They wanted to enlarge the area taken into consideration in the study of deviant phenomena by including in it activities of others than the allegedly deviant actor. They supposed, of course, that when they did that, and as new sources of variance were included in the calculations, all the questions that students of deviance conventionally looked at would take on a different cast.

Further, the act of labelling, as carried out by moral entrepreneurs, while important, cannot possibly be conceived as the sole explanation of what alleged deviants actually do. It would be foolish to propose that stick-up men stick people up simply because someone has labelled them stick-up men, or that everything a homosexual does results from someone having called him homosexual. Nevertheless, one of the most important contributions of this approach has been to focus attention on the way labelling places the actor in circumstances which make it harder for him to continue the normal routines of everyday life and thus provoke him to "abnormal" actions (as when a prison record makes it harder to earn a living at a conventional occupation and so disposes its possessor to move into an illegal one). The degree to which labelling has such effects is, however, an empirical one, to be settled by research into specific cases rather than by theoretical fiat. (See Becker, 1963, pp. 34-35; Lemert, 1951, pp. 71-76; Ray, 1961; and Lemert, 1972.)

Finally, the theory, when it focuses attention on the undeniable actions of those officially in charge of defining deviance, does not make an empirical characterization of the results of particular social institutions. To suggest that defining someone as deviant may under certain circumstances dispose him to a particular line of action is not the same as saying that mental hospitals always drive people crazy or that jails always turn people into habitual criminals.

Labelling achieved its theoretical importance in quite another way. Classes of acts, and particular examples of them, may or may not be thought deviant by any of the various relevant audiences that view them. The difference in definition, in the label applied to the act, makes a difference in what everyone, audiences and actors alike, does subsequently. What the theory did, as Albert Cohen (1965; 1966; 1968) has pointed out, was to create a four-cell property space by combining two dichotomous variables, the commission or noncommission of a given act and the definition of that act as deviant or not. The theory is not a theory about one of the resulting four cells, but a theory about all four of them and their interrelations. In which of those cells we actually locate deviance proper is less important (merely a matter of definition though, like all such matters, not trivial) than understanding that we lose by looking at any one cell alone without seeing it in connection with the others.

My own original formulation created some confusion by referring to one of those variables as "obedient" (as opposed to "rule-breaking") behavior. The distinction implied the prior existence of a determination that rule-breaking had occurred, though, of course, it was just that that the theory proposed to make problematic. I think it better to describe that dimension as the commission or noncommission of a given act. Ordinarily, of course, we study those acts that others are likely to define as deviant; this maximizes our chances of seeing the complicated drama of accusation and definition that is the center of our field of study. Thus, we may be interested in whether a person smokes marihuana, or engages in homosexual acts in public toilets, in part because these acts are likely to be defined as deviant when discovered. We also, of course, study them as phenomena which are interesting in other ways as well. Thus, by studying marihuana use, we can study the way people learn through social interaction to interpret their own physical experience (Becker, 1953). By studying homosexual encounters in public toilets, we can learn how people coordinate their activities through tacit communication (Humphreys, 1970). We can also ask how the high probability that the act will be defined as deviant affects learning the activity and continuing it. It is useful to have a term which indicates that others are likely to define such activities as deviant without making that a scientific judgment that the act is in fact deviant. I suggest we call such acts "potentially deviant."

Labelling theory, then, is neither a theory, with all the achievements and obligations that go with the title, nor focused so exclusively on the act of labelling as some have thought. It is, rather, a way of looking at a general area of human activity; a perspective whose value will appear, if at all, in increased understanding of things formerly obscure. (I will indulge my dislike of the conventional label for the theory by referring to it from now on as an interactionist theory of deviance.)

Deviance as Collective Action

Sociologists agree that what they study is society, but the consensus persists only if we don't look into the nature of society too closely. I prefer to think of what we study as collective action. People act, as Mead (1934) and Blumer (1966; 1969) have made clearest, together. They do what they do with an eye on what others have done, are doing, and may do in the future. One tries to fit his own line of action into the actions of others, just as each of them likewise adjusts his own developing actions to what he sees and expects others to do. The result of all this adjusting and fitting in can be called a collective action, especially if it is kept in mind that the term covers more than just a conscious collective agreement to, let's say, go on strike, but also extends to participating in a school class, having a meal together, or crossing the street—each of these seen as something being done by a lot of people together.

I don't mean, in using terms like "adjustment" and "fitting in," to suggest an overly peaceful view of social life, or any necessity for people to succumb to social constraints. I mean only that people ordinarily take into account what is going on around them and what is likely to go on after they decide what they will do. The adjusting may consist of deciding that since the police will probably look here, I'll put the bomb there, as well as of deciding that since the police are going to look, I guess I won't make any bombs at all or even think about it any more.

Neither do I mean, in the foregoing discussion, to imply that social life consists only of face-to-face encounters between individuals. Individuals may engage in intense and persistent interaction though they never encounter one another face-to-face: the interaction of stamp collectors takes place largely through the mail. Further, the give-and-take of interaction, the fitting in and mutual adjustment of lines of activity, occur as well between groups and organizations. The political processes surrounding the drama of deviance have that character. Economic organizations, professional associations, trade unions, lobbyists, moral entreprenuers, and legislators all interact to establish the conditions under which those who represent the state in enforcing laws, for example, interact with those alleged to have violated them.

If we can view any kind of human activity as collective, we can view deviance so. What results? One result is the general view I want to call "interactionist." In its simplest form, the theory insists that we look at all the people involved in any episode of alleged deviance. When we do, we discover that these activities require the overt or tacit cooperation of many people and groups to occur as they do. When workers collude to restrict industrial production (Roy, 1954), they do so with the help of inspectors, maintenance men, and the man in the tool crib. When members of industrial firms steal, they do so with the active cooperation of others above and below them in the firm's hierarchy (Dalton, 1959). Those observations alone cast doubt on theories that seek the origins of deviant acts in individual psychology, for we would have to posit a miraculous meeting of individual forms of pathology to account for the complicated forms of collective activity we observe. Because it is hard to cooperate with people whose reality-testing equipment is inadequate, people suffering from psychological difficulties don't fit well into criminal conspiracies.

When we see deviance as collective action, we immediately see that people act with an eye to the responses of others involved in that action. They take into account the way their fellows will evaluate what they do, and how that evaluation will affect their prestige and rank: The delinquents studied by Short and Strodtbeck (1965) did some of the things they got into trouble for because they wanted to maintain the positions of esteem they held in their gangs.

When we look at all the people and organizations in- volved in an episode of potentially deviant behavior, we discover too that the collective activity going on consists of more than acts of alleged wrongdoing. It is an involved drama in which making allegations of wrongdoing is a central feature. Indeed, Erikson (1966) and Douglas (1970), among others, have identified the study of deviance as essentially the study of the construction and reaffirmation of moral meanings in everyday social life. Some of the chief actors do not themselves engage in wrongdoing, but rather appear as enforcers of law or morality, as people who complain that other actors are doing wrong, take them into custody, bring them before legal authorities, or administer punishment themselves. If we look long enough and close enough, we discover that they do this sometimes, but not all the time; to some people but not others; in some places but not others. Those discrepancies cast doubt on simple notions about when something is, after all, wrong. We see that the actors themselves often disagree about what is deviant, and often doubt the deviant character of an act. The courts disagree; the police have reservations even when the law is clear; those engaged in the proscribed activity disagree with official definitions. We see, further, that some acts which, by commonly recognized standards, clearly ought to be defined as deviant are not defined that way by anyone. We see that enforcers of law and morality often temporize, allowing some acts to go undetected or unpunished because it would be too much trouble to pursue the matter, because they have limited resources and can't pursue everyone, because the wrongdoer has sufficient power to protect himself from their incursions, because they have been paid to look the other way.

If a sociologist looks for neat categories of crime and deviance and expects to be able to tell clearly when someone has committed one of these acts, so that he can look for its correlates, he finds all these anomalies troublesome. He may hope that they will be disposed of by improved techniques of data gathering and analysis. The long history of attempts to provide those devices ought to tell us the hope is misplaced: That area of human endeavor will not support a belief in the inevitability of progress.

The trouble is not technical. It is theoretical. We can construct workable definitions either of particular actions people might commit or of particular categories of deviance as the world (especially, but not only, the authorities) defines them. But we cannot make the two coincide completely, because they do not do so empirically. They belong to two distinct, though overlapping, systems of collective action. One consists of the people who cooperate to produce the act in question. The other consists of the people who cooperate in the drama of morality by which "wrongdoing" is discovered and dealt with, whether that procedure is formal and legal or quite informal.

Much of the heated discussion over interactionist theories comes from an equivocation in which the word "deviance" is made to stand for two distinct processes taking place in those two systems (a good example is Alvarez, 1968). On the one hand, some analysts want "deviance" to mean acts which, to any "reasonable" member of a society, or by some agreed-on definition (such as violation of an allegedly existent rule, statistical rarity, or psychological pathology), are wrong. They want to focus on the system of action in which those acts occur. The same analysts also want to apply the word to the people who are apprehended and treated as having committed that act. In this case, they want to focus on the system of action in which those judgments occur. This equivocation on the term causes no inaccuracy if and only if those who commit the act and those apprehended are the same. We know they are not. Therefore, if we take as our unit of study those who committed the act (assuming we can identify them), we necessarily include some who have not been apprehended and labelled; if we take as our unit those apprehended and labelled, we necessarily include some who never committed the act but were treated as if they had (Kitsuse and Cicourel, 1963).

Neither alternative pleases. What interactionist theorists have done is to treat the two systems as distinct, noting whatever overlap and interaction occurs between them but not assuming their occurrence. Thus, one can study the genesis of drug use, as Lindesmith (1968) and I did, and deal with etiological questions, never supposing, however, that what the people studied do has any necessary connection with a generalized quality of deviance. Or one can, as many recent studies have done (e.g., Gusfield, 1963), study the drama of moral rhetoric and action in which imputations of deviance are made, accepted, rejected, and fought over. The chief effect of interactionist theory has been to focus attention on that drama as an object of study, and especially to focus on some relatively unstudied participants in it—those sufficiently powerful to make their imputations of deviance stick: police, courts, physicians, school officials, and parents.

I intended my own original formulations to emphasize the logical independence of acts and the judgments people made of them. That formulation, however, contained ambiguities that bordered on self-contradiction, especially in connection with the notion of "secret deviance." 1 Examining those ambiguities and some possible resolutions of them shows us that fruitful development of the theory probably lies in a more detailed analysis than we have yet made of deviance as collective action.

If we begin by saying that an act is deviant when it is so defined, what can it mean to call an act an instance of secret deviance? Since no one has defined it as deviant it cannot, by definition, be deviant; but "secret" indicates that we know it is deviant, even if no one else does. Lorber partially resolved this paradox (1967) by suggesting that in an important class of cases the actor himself defined what he did as deviant, even though he managed to keep others from finding out about it, either believing that it really was deviant or recognizing that others would believe that.

But what if the actor failed to make that definition? What if, even more telling, there were no acts that scientists would recognize as capable of being so defined? (I have in mind here such offenses as witchcraft [ Selby, unpublished]; we cannot imagine a case of a secret witch, since we "know" that no one can actually copulate with the Devil, or summon demons.) In neither case can we count on self-definition to resolve the paradox. But we can extend Lorber's idea by seeing that it implies a procedure which, were it applied by the appropriate people, would lead them to make such a judgment, given the "facts" of the particular case. People who believe in witches have ways of deciding when an act of witchcraft has been committed. We may know enough about the circumstances to know that, if those people use such methods, what they discover will lead them to conclude that witchcraft has occurred. In the case of less imaginary offenses, we may know, for instance, that a person has in his pocket materials which, should the police search him, would make him liable to a charge of possession of drugs.

In other words, secret deviance consists of being vulnerable to the commonly used procedures for discovering deviance of a particular kind, of being in a position where it will be easy to make the definition stick. What makes this distinctively collective is the collectively accepted character of the procedures of discovery and proof.

Even with this addition, however, difficulties remain. In another important class of cases—the construction of rules ex post facto—there can have been no secret deviance because the rule did not exist until after the act in question was alleged to have been committed (Katz, 1972). Case-finding procedures might elicit the facts that someone later uses to prove commission of a deviant act, but the person could not have been deviant, secretly or otherwise, because the rule did not exist. Yet he might well be defined as deviant, perhaps when what he might have done becomes public and someone decides that if there was no rule against it, there ought to be. Was he then secretly deviant before?

The paradox resolves itself when we recognize that, like all other forms of collective activity, the acts and definitions in the drama of deviance take place over time, and differ from one time to the next. Definitions of behavior occur sequentially, and an act may be defined as non-deviant at ti and deviant at t, without implying that it was both simultaneously. Making use of our previous result, we see that an act might not be secretly deviant at t1 because no procedure then in use would produce evidence of an act which competent judges would take to be deviant. The same act might be secretly deviant at t, because, a new rule having been made in the interim, a procedure now existed which would allow that determination.

The last formulation reminds us of the important role that power plays in interactionist theories of deviance (Horowitz and Liebowitz, 1968). Under what circumstances do we make and enforce ex post facto rules? I think empirical investigation will show that it occurs when one party to a relationship is disproportionately powerful, so that he can enforce his will over others' objections but wishes to maintain an appearance of justice and rationality. This characteristically occurs in the relations of parents and children, and in such similarly paternalistic arrangements as welfare worker and client, or teacher and student.

By viewing deviance as a form of collective activity, to be investigated in all its facets like any other form of collective activity, we see that the object of our study is not an isolated act whose origin we are to discover. Rather, the act alleged to occur, when it has occurred, takes place in a complex network of acts involving others, and takes on some of that complexity because of the way various people and groups define it. The lesson applies to our studies of every other area of social life. Learning it will not free us from error fully, however, for our own theories and methods present persistent sources of trouble.

Demystifying Deviance

Sociologists have made trouble for themselves by their virtually unbreakable habit of making common events and experiences mysterious. I remember—one of my first experiences in graduate school—Ernest Burgess warning our class of novices against being led astray by common sense. At the same time, Everett Hughes enjoined us to pay close attention to what we could see and hear with our own eyes and ears. Some of us thought there might be a contradiction between the two imperatives, but suppressed our worry to save our sanity.

Both injunctions have a substantial kernel of truth. Common sense, in one of its meanings, can delude us. This common sense is the traditional wisdom of the tribe, the melange of "what everybody knows" that children learn as they grow up, the stereotypes of everyday life. It includes social-science generalizations about the nature of social phenomena, correlations between social categories (e.g., between race and crime, or class and intelligence), and the etiology of problematic social conditions like poverty and war. Commonsense generalizations resemble those of social science in formal structure; they differ largely in their immunity to contradictory observations. Social-science generalizations, in principle and often in fact, change when new observations show them incorrect. Common-sense generalizations don't. This kind of common sense, particularly because its errors are not random, favors established institutions.

Another meaning of common sense suggests that the common man, his head unencumbered by fancy theories and abstract professorial notions, can at least see what is right there in front of his nose. Philosophies as disparate as pragmatism and Zen enshrine a respect for the common man's ability to see, with Sancho Panza, that a windmill is really a windmill. To think it a knight on horseback is, however you look at it, a real mistake.

Sociologists often ignore the injunctions of this version of common sense. We may not turn windmills into knights. But we often turn collective activity—people doing things together—into abstract nouns whose connection to people doing things together is tenuous. We then typically lose interest in the more mundane things people are actually doing. We ignore what we see because it is not abstract, and chase after the invisible "forces" and "conditions" we have learned to think sociology is all about.

Novice sociologists frequently have great trouble doing field research because they do not recognize sociology, as they have read it, in the human activity they see all around them. They spend eight hours observing a factory or a school, and return with two pages of notes and the explanation that "nothing much happened." They mean that they observed no instances of anomie or stratification or bureaucracy or any of the other conventional sociological topics. They don't see that we invented those terms to enable us to deal conveniently with a number of instances of people doing things together which we have decided are sufficiently alike in specific ways for us to treat them as the same for analytic purposes. Disdaining common sense, novices ignore what happens all around them. Failing to record the details of everyday life in their notes, they cannot use them to study such abstractions as anomie, or others they might themselves construct. An important methodological problem is to systematize the procedure by which we move from an appreciation of ethnographic detail to concepts useful in addressing problems we have come to our research with or have since become aware of.

Conversely, the people sociologists study often have trouble recognizing themselves and their activities in the sociological reports written about them. We ought to worry about that more than we do. We should not expect laymen to make our analyses for us. But neither should we ignore those matters laymen habitually take into account when we describe, or make assumptions about, how they carry on their activities. Many theories of deviance posit, implicitly or explicitly, that a particular set of attitudes underlies commission of some potentially rule-violating act, even though the theory bases itself on data (such as official records) which cannot speak to this point. Consider the descriptions of the actor's state of mind found in theorizing about anomie, from Durkheim through Merton to Cloward and Ohlin. If the people studied cannot recognize themselves in those descriptions without coaching, we should pay attention.

It is not only the descriptions of their own mental states that actors cannot recognize. They often cannot recognize the acts they are supposed to have engaged in, because the sociologist has not observed those acts closely, or paid any attention to their details when he has. The omission has serious results. It makes it impossible for us to put the real contingencies of action into our theories, to make them take account of the constraints and opportunities actually present. We may find ourselves theorizing about activities which never occur in the way we imagine.

If we look closely at what we observe we will very likely see the matters to which interactionist theory calls attention. We see that people who engage in acts conventionally thought deviant are not motivated by mysterious, unknowable forces. They do what they do for much the same reasons that justify more ordinary activities. We see that social rules, far from being fixed and immutable, are continually constructed anew in every situation, to suit the convenience, will, and power position of various participants. We see that activities thought deviant often require elaborate networks of cooperation such as could hardly be sustained by people suffering from disabling mental difficulties. Interactionist theory may be an almost inevitable consequence of submitting our theories of deviance to the editing of close observation of the things they purport to be about.

Insofar as both common sense and science enjoin us to look at things closely before we start theorizing about them, obedience to the injunction produces a complex theory that takes into account the actions and reactions of everyone involved in episodes of deviance. It leaves for empirical determination (instead of settling by assumption) such matters as whether the alleged acts actually occurred, and whether official reports are accurate and to what degree. In consequence (and this is a source of great difficulty to older styles of deviance research), great doubt arises as to the utility of the various statistical series and official records researchers have been accustomed to use. I will not rehearse the major criticisms of official records, the defenses that have been made of them, and the new uses suggested for them, but simply note that a closer look at people acting together has made us aware that records are also produced by people acting together, and must be understood in that context. (See Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963; Garfinkel and Bittner, 1967; Cicourel, 1968; Biderman and Reiss, 1967; Douglas, 1967.)

The connection between an interactionist theory of deviance and a reliance on intensive field observation as a major method of data-gathering can hardly be accidental. On the other hand, I think it is not a necessary connection. Interactionist theory grows out of a frame of mind that takes the commonplace seriously and will not settle for mysterious invisible forces as explanatory mechanisms. That frame of mind undoubtedly flourishes when one continually confronts the details of the things he proposes to explain in all their complexity. It is easier to construct mythical wrongdoers, and give them whatever qualities go best with our hypothesized explanations, if we have only such fragments of fact as we might find in an official folder or in the answers to a questionnaire. As Galtung (1965) has suggested in another connection, mythical constructs cannot defend themselves against the onslaught of contrary fact produced by intimate acquaintance.

Some people have noted that too great an emphasis on first-hand observation may cause us unintentionally to limit ourselves to those groups and sites we can easily get access to, thus failing to study the powerful people and groups who can defend themselves against our incursions. In this way, preference for an observational technique could work against the theoretical recommendation to study all parties to the drama of deviance, and undo some of the advantages of an interactionist approach. We can guard against this danger both by varying our methods and by being more ingenious in our use of observational techniques. Mills (1956), among others, demonstrates the variety of methods that can be used to study the powerful, and especially the study of those documents that become public through inadvertence, by virtue of the workings of governmental agencies, or because the powerful sometimes fight among themselves and provide data for us when they do. Similarly, we can make use of techniques of unobtrusive entry and accidental access (Becker and Mack, 1971) to gather direct observational data. (Relevant problems of access and sampling are discussed in several papers in Habenstein, 1970.)

Sociologists have generally been reluctant to take the close look at what sits in front of their noses I have recommended here. That reluctance especially infected deviance studies. Overcoming it has produced the same gain in studies of deviance that similar moves produced in studies of industry, education, and communities. It also increased the moral complexity of our theories and research, and I turn to those problems now.

Moral Problems

Moral problems arise in all sociological research but are especially provocatively posed by interactionist theories of deviance. Moral criticism has come from the political center and beyond; from the political Left, and from left field. Interactionist theories have been accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, be the enemy those who would upset the stability of the existing order or the Establishment. They have been accused of openly espousing unconventional norms, of refusing to support anti-Establishment positions, and (the left-field position) of appearing to support anti-Establishment causes while subtly favoring the status quo.

Interactionist theories as subversive. Many critics (not necessarily conservative, though some are) believe that interactionist theories of deviance openly or covertly attack conventional morality, willfully refusing to accept its definitions of what is and is not deviant, and calling into question the assumptions on which conventional organizations dealing with deviance operate. Lemert, for instance, says:

On the surface deviance sociology seems to offer a relatively detached or scientific way of studying certain types of social problems. Yet its mood and tone and choice of research subjects disclose a strong fixed critical stance toward the ideology, values and methods of state dominated agencies of social control. In extreme statements deviance is portrayed as little more than the result of arbitrary, fortuitous, or biased decision-making, to be understood as a sociopsychological process by which groups seek to create conditions for perpetuating established values and ways of behaving or enhancing the power of special groups. One impression left is that agencies of social control are described and analyzed to expose their failures in what they try to do and their incidental encroachments on "inalienable rights" and "freedom." Thus seen, deviance sociology is more social criticism than science. It offers little to facilitate and foster the kinds of decisions and controls actually necessary to maintain the unique quality of our society—the freedom to choose. (Lemert, 1972, p. 24)

Such critics think that the principled determination to treat official and conventional viewpoints as things to be studied, instead of accepting them as fact or self-evident truth, is a mischievous assault on the social order (Bordua, 1967).
Consider again the criticism that "labelling theory" irremediably confuses what it proposed to explain with its explanation. If it treats deviance solely as a matter of definition by those who react to it, but simultaneously posits a deviant-something-to-which-they-react, then the deviance must somehow exist prior to the reaction. Some critics do not focus on the real logical difficulties I considered earlier, but rather insist that there must be some quality of an act that can be taken as deviant, independent of anyone's reaction. They usually find that quality in the act's violation of an agreed-on rule (e.g., Gibbs, 1966; Alvarez, 1968). They think theorists who will not admit that some acts are really deviant, at least in the sense of rule violation, perverse.

But interactionist theorists, not especially perverse, have emphasized the independence of act and reaction, creating a property space of four cells by combining the commission or noncommission of a potentially deviant act with a deviance-defining reaction or its absence. What seems to have bothered critics in this procedure is that the term "deviance" has then more often been applied to the pair of cells characterized by acts defined as deviant, whether the alleged acts occurred or not. The choice probably reflects analysts' unwillingness to seem to approve the derogatory classification of potentially deviant acts. The unwillingness arises out of their recognition of the intrinsically situational character of rules, which exist only in the perpetually renewed consensus of one situation after another rather than as persisting specific embodiments of basic value (see the concept of "negotiated order" in Strauss et al., 1964).

In any event, had interactionsts typically called deviant the commission of potentially deviant acts, whatever the reaction to them, fewer would have complained. Many of us used the term loosely to cover all three cases in which deviance might be implicated: commission of a potentially deviant act without deviance-defining; deviance-defining without commission; and their co-existence. That sloppiness deserves criticism, but the important point is that no one of these is itself the whole story of deviance. That lies in the interaction among all the parties involved.

To return to the larger point, the real attack on the social order is to insist that all parties involved are fit objects of study. The earlier definition of the field of deviance as the study of people alleged to have violated rules respected that order by exempting the creators and enforcers of those rules from study. To be exempted from study means that one's claims, theories, and statements of fact are not subjected to critical scrutiny (Becker, 1967).

The interactionist reluctance to accept conventional theories has led to a critical attitude toward the assertions of conventional authority and morality, and to a hostility toward interactionist analyses on the part of their spokesmen and defenders. Thus, police officials assert that most policemen are honest except for the few rotten apples found in every barrel. Sociological investigations showing that police misbehavior results from structural imperatives built into the organization of police work provoke "defenses" of the police against social scientists. Similarly, the assertion that mental illness is a matter of social definition (e.g., Scheff, 1966) provokes the reply that people in mental hospitals are really sick (Gove, 1970a, 1970b), an answer which misses the point of the definitional argument but hits at the implied moral one by suggesting that psychiatrists, after all, know what they're doing.

lnteractionist theories as establishmentarian. For the reasons just suggested, interactionist theories look (and are) rather Left. Intentionally or otherwise, they are corrosive of conventional modes of thought and established institutions. Nevertheless, the Left has criticized those theories, and in a way that mirrors more middle-of-the-road objections.2 Just as people who approve existing institutions dislike the way interactionist theories call their assumptions and legitimacy into question, people who think existing institutions rotten complain that interactionist theories fail to say that those institutions are rotten. Both complain of an ambiguous moral stance, locating the trouble in an unfortunate "value-free" ideology which pretends to neutrality while in fact espousing either a "radical" or "merely liberal" ideology, as the case may be (Mankoff, 1970; Liazos, 1972).

The trouble evidently comes from some equivocation over the notion of being value free. I take it that all social scientists agree that, given a question and a method of reaching an answer, any scientist, whatever his political or other values, should arrive at much the same answer, an answer given by the world of recalcitrant fact that is "out there" whatever we think about it. Insofar as a left-wing sociologist proposes to base political action on his own or others' research findings, he had better strive for this and hope it can be done. Otherwise, his actions may fail because of what his values prevented him from seeing.

That simple formulation cannot be objectionable. But all social scientists miss that goal to some degree, and the missing may result in one way or another from the scientist's values. We may miscount black citizens in the census because we do not think it worth the extra trouble it may take, given their life style, to look for them. We may fail to investigate police corruption because we think it unlikely that it exists—or because it would be unseemly to call attention to it if it did. We may suggest that we can understand political protest by examining the personalities of protestors, thereby implying that the institutions they protest against play no part in the development of their acts of dissidence. We may do work which will be helpful to authorities in dealing with troublemakers, as would be the case were we to discover correlates of radicalism that school authorities, employers, and police could use to weed out potential troublemakers.
The moral questions become more pressing as we move from the technical notion of value freedom to the choice of problems, ways of stating problems, and uses to which findings can be put. Some of these troubles follow from sociology's failure to take itself seriously, to follow the injunction that almost every version of our basic theory contains but which is perhaps clearest in interactionist theory (Blumer, 1967): to study all the parties to a situation, and their relationships. Following that injunction automatically leads us to police corruption where it exists and has anything to do with what we are studying. Following it, we would not study political protest as though it involved only the protestors. A value-free sociology which rigorously followed its own precepts would not trouble the Left this way.

The question of the use of the findings cannot be settled so easily, however. Nor can the question that has plagued many professional associations: whether professional sociologists have any right to a special opinion, by virtue of being sociologists, on moral and political questions. We can see that they might, where it is warranted, claim expertise with respect to the consequences of various policies. And we can see that they might be especially concerned about whose interests they were serving. But we find it harder to substantiate the assertion that the sociologist, by virtue of his science, has any special knowledge, or claim on our attention, with respect to moral questions. Why? Because science, we say, is value-free. We then go on to make tenuous distinctions, impossible to maintain in practice, between the sociologist as scientist and the sociologist as citizen. For we all agree that the citizen—sociologist not only may take moral positions, but cannot avoid doing so.

We cannot maintain these distinctions in practice because, as Edel 3 (1955) has so tellingly argued, ascertaining facts, constructing scientific theories, and arriving at ethical judgments cannot be so neatly separated. While you cannot logically deduce what ought to be done from premises about what is, responsible ethical judgments depend very much on our assessment of the way the world and its components are constructed, how they work, what they are capable of. Those assessments rest on good scientific work. They color our ethical decisions by making us see the full moral complexity of what we study; the particular way our general ethical commitments are embodied in a given situation; how our contingent ethical commitments to values like justice, health, mercy, or reason intersect, converge, and conflict.

Our work speaks continuously to ethical questions; it is continuously informed and directed by our ethical concerns. We don't want our values to interfere with our assessment of the validity of our propositions about social life, but we cannot help their influencing our choice of propositions to investigate, or the uses to which we put our findings. Nor should we mind that they do. Simultaneously, our ethical judgments cannot help being influenced by the increasing knowledge our scientific work confronts them with. Science and ethics interpenetrate.

Take marihuana use. Our judgment must change when we shift our view of it from a picture of unbridled indulgence in perverse pleasure to one of a merciless psychic compulsion to tranquilize inner conflict, as psychiatric theories and data proposed. Our judgment changes again when we view it as a relatively harmless recreation whose worst consequences, social and individual, seem to arise from how nonusers react to users. (See Kaplan, 1970; Goode, 1970.) Those of us concerned with maximizing human freedom will now concentrate on the question of the relative harm caused by the indulgence of pleasure as opposed to its repression. We might study the operation of enforcement systems, the development of vested interests among the bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who operate them, the forces that divert them from their intended aims, the irrelevance of their intended aims to the situations and consequences of uses—all this by way of pursuing the value of freedom. We would be prepared to discover that the premises on which our inquiries are based are incorrect (that, for example, enforcement systems do operate efficiently and honestly to deal with serious troubles for individuals and communities), and we would conduct our research so as to make such discovery possible.

Sociologists beginning from other ethical positions might investigate the pressures of peers, the mass media, and other sources of personal influence that lead to drug use and thus to the breakdown of social order via the mechanism of release from moral constraints. They might look into the subtle way those pressures force people to use drugs and thus limit freedom in the general way feared by earlier psychological theories, even though the mechanism involved differed. They too would be prepared to find their premises and hypotheses invalid. Sociologists who failed to look into the matter at all would thereby signify their belief that it was morally proper to ignore it.

Interactionist theories of deviance come under fire when critics find this complex picture of the relations between scientific research and ethical judgment overly subtle and insufficiently forthright. Just as centrist critics complain of interactionist theory's perverse unwillingness to acknowledge that rape, robbery, and murder are really deviant, so Left critics argue that it refuses to recognize that class oppression, racial discrimination, and imperialism are really deviant, or that poverty and injustice are really social problems, however people define them (Mankoff, 1968).4 Both sides want to see their ethical preconceptions incorporated into scientific work in the form of uninspected factual assertions relying on the implicit use of ethical judgments about which there is a high degree of consensus.

Thus, if I say that rape is really deviant or imperialism really a social problem, I imply that those phenomena have certain empirical characteristics which, we would all agree, make them reprehensible. We might, by our studies, be able to establish just that; but we are very often asked to accept it by definition. Defining something as deviant or as a social problem makes empirical demonstration unnecessary and protects us from discovering that our preconception is incorrect (when the world isn't as we imagine it). When we protect our ethical judgments from empirical tests by enshrining them in difinitions, we commit the error of sentimentalism.5

Scientists often wish to make it appear that some cornplicated combination of sociological theories, scientific evidence, and ethical judgments is really no more than a simple matter of definition. Scientists who have made strong value commitments (of whatever political or moral variety) seem especially likely to want that. Why do people want to disguise their morals as science? Most likely, they realize or intuit the contemporary rhetorical advantage of not having to admit that it is "only a moral judgment" one is making, and pretending instead that it is a scientific finding. All parties to any major social and moral controversy will attempt to gain that advantage and present their moral position as so axiomatic that it can be built into the presuppositions of their theory, research, and political dogma, without question. I suggest to the Left, whose sympathies I share, that we should attack injustice and oppression directly and openly, rather than pretend that the judgment that such things are evil is somehow deducible from sociological first principles, or warranted by empirical findings alone.

Our ethical dispositions and judgments, while they properly play a part in our scientific work, should play a different role in the various activities that constitute a sociologist's work. When we test our hypotheses and propositions against empirical evidence we try to minimize their influence, fearing that wishful thinking will color our conclusions. When we select problems for research, however, we take into account (along with such practical matters as our ability to gain access, and such theoretical concerns as the likelihood of achieving powerful general conclusions) the bearing of our potential findings on ethical problems we care about. We want to find out whether our initial judgments are correct, what possibilities of action are open to us and to other actors in the situation, what good might be accomplished with the knowledge we hope to gather. When we decide what actions to take on the basis of our findings, and when we decide whom to give advice to, our ethical commitments clearly dominate our choices—though we still want to be accurate in our assessment of the consequences of any such act. Finally, we sometimes begin with the actions we want to take and the people we want to help, as a basis for choosing problems and methods.

The criticism from left field. Some critics (e.g., Gouldner, 1968) have argued that interactionist theories of deviance, while appearing anti-Establishment, in fact support the Establishment by attacking lower-level functionaries of oppressive institutions, leaving the higher-ups responsible for the oppression unscathed and, indeed, assisting them by blowing the whistle on their unruly underlings.

In the present state of our knowledge, we can only deal with such questions speculatively. No evidence has been adduced to support the criticism, nor could one readily find evidence to refute it. The criticism speaks to the general moral thrust of interactionist theories, as well as to factual questions of the consequences of research and theorizing, and can be challenged on that ground.

Interactionist theories of deviance, like interactionist theories generally, pay attention to how social actors define each other and their environments. They pay particular attention to differentials in the power to define; in the way one group achieves and uses the power to define how other groups will be regarded, understood, and treated. Elites, ruling classes, bosses, adults, men, Caucasians—superordinate groups generally—maintain their power as much by controlling how people define the world, its components, and its possibilities, as by the use of more primitive forms of control. They may use more primitive means to establish hegemony. But control based on the manipulation of definitions and labels works more smoothly and costs less; superordinates prefer it. The attack on hierarchy begins with an attack on definitions, labels, and conventional conceptions of who's who and what's what.

History has moved us increasingly in the direction of disguised modes of control based on control of the definitions and labels applied to people. We exert control by accusing people of deviant acts of various kinds. In the United States, we indict political dissidents for using illegal drugs. Almost every modern state makes use of psychiatric diagnoses, facilities, and personnel to confine politically troublesome types as varied as Ezra Pound or Z. A. Medvedev (Szasz, 1965). When we study how moral entrepreneurs get rules made and how enforcers apply those rules in particular cases, we study the way superordinates of every description maintain their positions. To put it another way, we study some of the forms of oppression, and the means by which oppression achieves the status of being "normal," "everyday," and legitimate.

Most research on deviance in the interactionist mode has concentrated on the immediate participants in localized dramas of deviance: those who engage in various forms of crime and vice, and those enforcers they meet in their daily rounds. We have tended more to study policemen, mental-hospital attendants, prison guards, psychiatrists, and the like, and less their superiors or their superiors' superiors. (There are exceptions: Messinger's [1969] study of prison administration; Dalton's [1959] study of industrial managers; Skolnick's [1969] application of deviance theory to the politics of protest in the United States.)

But the focus on lower-level authorities not only is neither exclusive nor inevitable; its actual effect is to cast doubt on higher-level authorities who are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. They may explicitly order those actions, order them in Aesopian language so that they can deny having done it if necessary, or simply allow them to occur through incompetence or oversight. If the actions are reprehensible, then higher authorities, one way or another, share in the blame. Even if no general is ever brought to trail for the killings at My Lai, those events shook such faith as people had in the moral correctness of the military action in Vietnam and of those at the highest levels responsible for it. Similarly, when we understand how school psychiatrists operate as agents of school officials rather than of their patients (Szasz, 1967), we lose some of whatever faith we had in the institutions of conventional psychiatry. The rapidity with which official spokesmen at the highest levels move to counter analyses of even the lowest-level corruption, incompetence, or injustice should let us see at least as clearly as they do the degree to which those analyses attack institutions as well as their agents, and superiors as well as their subordinates. Such research has special moral sting to it when it allows us to inspect the practice of an institution in the light of its own professed aims and its own preferred descriptions of what it is about. Because of that, our work invariably has a critical thrust when it produces anything that can be construed as an evaluation of the operations of a society or any of its parts.

Conclusion

The interactionist approach to deviance has served not only to clarify the phenomena that have conventionally been studied under that rubric but also to complicate our moral view of them. The interactionist approach begins that double task of clarification and complication by making sociologists aware that a wider range of people and events needs to be included in our study of deviant phenomena, by sensitizing us to the importance of a wider range of fact. We study all the participants in these moral dramas, accusers as well as accused, offering a conventional exemption from our professional inquiries to no one, no matter how respectable or highly placed. We look carefully at the actual activities in question, attempting to understand the contingencies of action for everyone concerned. We accept no invocation of mysterious forces at work in the drama of deviance, respecting that version of common sense which focuses our attention on what we can see plainly as well as on those events and interests which require more subtle data-gathering and theoretical analysis.

At a second level, the interactionist approach shows sociologists that a major element in every aspect of the drama of deviance is the imposition of definitions—of situations, acts, and people—by those powerful enough or sufficiently legitimated to be able to do so. A full understanding requires the thorough study of those definitions and the processes by which they develop and attain legitimacy and taken-forgrantedness.

Both these levels of analysis give the interactionist approach, under present circumstances, a radical character. Interactionist analyses, by making moral entrepreneurs (as well as those they seek to control) objects of study, violate society's hierarchy of credibility. They question the monopoly on the truth and the "whole story" claimed by those in positions of power and authority. They suggest that we need to discover the truth about allegedly deviant phenomena for ourselves, instead of relying on the officially certified accounts which ought to be enough for any good citizen. They adopt a relativistic stance toward the accusations and definitions of deviance made by respectable people and constituted authority, treating them as the raw material of social science analysis rather than as statements of unquestioned moral truths.

Interactionist analyses of deviant phenomena become radical in a final sense by being treated as radical by conventional authorities. When authorities, political and otherwise, wield power in part by obfuscation and mystification, a science which makes things clearer inevitably attacks the bases of that power. The authorities whose institutions and jurisdictions become the object of interactionist analyses attack those analyses for their "biases," their failure to accept traditional wisdom and values, their destructive effect on public order.6

These consequences of interactionist analysis complicate our moral position as scientists by the very act of clarifying what is going on in such moral arenas as courts, hospitals, schools, and prisons. They make it impossible to ignore the moral implications of our work. Even if we want to do that, those authorities who feel themselves under attack destroy the illusion of a neutral science by insisting that we are responsible for those implications—as, of course, we are.

This discussion of recent developments in deviance theory makes a beginning on a consideration of the moral import of contemporary sociology. We can make further progress on that knotty problem by similar examinations in such other fields of sociology as the study of educational institutions, health services, the military, industry, and business—indeed, in all the other areas in which sociological study clarifies the activities of people and institutions, and thereby influences our moral evaluations of them.

1. Jack Katz and John I. Kitsuse helped me greatly in the reanalysis of the problem of secret deviance.

2. Richard Berk has suggested to me that the chronic difficulty in deciding who is Left or "radical" leads to a situation in which the criticisms I am discussing, while they may come from people who so identify themselves and are so identified by some others, nevertheless do not flow out of a Marxist analysis of society which has perhaps a better claim to the label. He suggests further that such a line of criticism might focus on the degree to which it is possible to establish a continuity between the analysis of society-wide class groupings characteristic of that tradition and the more intensive study of smaller units characteristic of interactionist theories of deviance. I think the continuity exists, but am not in a position to argue the point analytically.

3. Irving Louis Horowitz prompted my belated acquaintance with the work of Abraham Edel.

4. The following statement embodies these themes neatly: "But is it not as much a social fact, even though few of us pay much attention to it, that the corporate economy kills and maims more, is more violent, than any violence committed by the poor (the usual subjects of studies of violence)? By what reasoning and necessity is the 'violence' of the poor in the ghettoes more worthy of our attention than the military bootcamps which numb recruits from the horrors of killing the 'enemy' ('Oriental human beings,' as we learned during the Calley trial)? But because these acts are not labelled 'Deviant,' because they are covert, institutional, and normal, their 'deviant' qualities are overlooked and they do not become part of the province of the sociology of deviance. Despite their best liberal intentions, these sociologists seem to perpetuate the very notions they think they debunk, and others of which they are unaware." (Liazos, 1972, pp. 110-111)

5. At least one critic (Gouldner, 1968) has misread my criticism of sentimentalism as a fear of emotion. The definition given in the text of "Whose Side Are We On?" (Becker, 1967, p. 245) makes my actual meaning quite clear: "We are sentimental, especially, when our reason is that we would prefer not to know what is going on, if to know would be to violate some sympathy whose existence we may not even be aware of."

6. For a fuller discussion of the notion of radical sociology, see Becker and Horowitz, 1972.

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