Social order is necessary for society; deviance is necessary for society. Those two statements appear to be contradictory, but they aren't. Social order is necessary because humans as a species only survive because we organize our behaviors. And social order is a problem: how can we get millions of individuals who seem to each have their own wants and needs to work together? Social order is seen as a problem because people are seen as individuals with different desires. So social order is in essence social control: it is society controlling the actions of the individual. And so when we are talking about social order we are really talking about the degree to which people are socially obedient. Your textbook explores six ways that social order is achieved. We'll be looking at those in our next sections.
But to really understand social control we must also understand deviance. The reason that understanding deviance is important to understanding social control is that we often think social obedience/control and deviance are somehow natural. In other words, we usually think that ACTIONS and/or PEOPLE are deviant. For example, people say that homosexuality is deviant. The way the word "is" operates in a sentence like that is interesting. What it means is that homosexuality has its very existence as deviance; that's what it is, that's how it exists. (Please keep in mind that I am NOT saying that homosexuality is deviant. It is an example I am using to illustrate what society does and the place that language plays in social control.) But what that kind of speaking and thinking hides is that deviance is socially constructed. What is thought of as deviant is simply a reflection of a society's norms; it is the mirrored, reversed picture of what society thinks is natural. So, homosexuality is only deviant in a society like ours. In other societies homosexuality has been viewed as normal and its behavior encouraged. Thus ACTIONS and PEOPLE do not exist as deviant, they are defined and constructed that way. Durkheim once said, "societies deserve the deviance they get" (paraphrased). Your activities in this section are oriented toward defining and understanding deviance. As I said before, deviance is necessary for society. We'll see how/why in our final section.
|
