Scholars interested in the medicalization of deviance tend to draw a clear line between major institutions of social control namely law, religion, and medicine and describe a process whereby medicine becomes more dominant than other institutions in terms of defining and controlling problematic behavior (Friedson [1970] 1988). This is not surprising, as the study of the medicalization of devianc...

In this study, the relations between parents, older siblings, peers, adolescents’individual characteristics, and adolescents’deviant attitudes and behaviors were examined simultaneously, using a social learning perspective and data of 121 families from inner-city Philadelphia. Results of structural equation models showed that older deviant siblings had the strongest effect on adolescent devianc...

The present study is a part of a broader multisited field study on involvement of relatives in Danish psychiatry. The article aims to elucidate which political classifications of normality and mental illness that are displayed in two health political campaigns regarding anti-stigmatization and social inclusion and how such classifications co-constitute the subjectivity of individuals suffering ...

The concept of stigma, denoting relations of shame, has a long ancestry and has from the earliest times been associated with deviations from the 'normal', including, in various times and places, deviations from normative prescriptions of acceptable states of being for self and others. This paper dwells on modern social formations and offers conceptual and theoretical pointers towards a more con...

Findings from a longitudinal study are presented on the relationships between the problems and stresses resulting from Hurricane Andrew and posthurricane minor deviant behavior. The sample (N = 4,978) included Hispanic, African-American, and White non-Hispanic middle school students enrolled in Dade County, Florida public schools. Two waves of data were collected prior to the hurricane; a third...

Robert Merton presented two, not always clearly differentiated theories in his seminal explorations on the social-structure-and-anomie paradigm: a strain theory and an anomie theory. A one-sided focus on Merton’s strain theory in the secondary literature has unnecessarily restricted the power and effectiveness of Merton’s anomie theory. For although structural strain is one way to explain why d...

Positive deviance refers to behavior that deviates from the norms of the reference group and has positive effects on the organization. It is an endogenous source of organizational creativity that has been shown to be powerful tool for learning and change. Despite growing interest, little remains known about the factors that stimulate positive deviance; in particular, how management can enable i...

Although his work has been largely overlooked by symbolic interactionists and other students of deviance, Aristotle (c384-322BCE) addresses community life, activity, agency, and persuasive interchange in ways that not only are remarkably consistent with contemporary symbolic interactionist approaches to deviance, but that also conceptually inform present day theories of deviance and provide val...