The dialectical relation between conflict and order, between stability and change, is a major theme throughout this book. This chapter treats it in regard to the special problems of deviance.
One cannot even form the notion of order without the contrasting notion of disorder, nor can conformity be conceived without a contrasting concept of deviance against which conformity can be measured. We know a light is on only if we know what it is for a light to be off. 1 Conformity and deviance, in other words, are complementary notions and they use useful tools for sociological investigation only if this complementarity it kept always in mind. If either the one or the other is absolutized, analysis is likely to end up in blind alleys.
The fact that deviance may be destructive of groups and larger social systems needs hardly much documentation. Thus, as Albert Cohen has written, "... the most destructive impact of deviance on organization is probably through its impact on trust, on confidence that others will, by and large, play by the rules." 2
When participants have committed some resources to an enterprise and have invested in it, they have done so under the assumption that if they play by the rules of the game, so will others. If they lose trust in the others playing by the rules and living up to expectations, they will tend to withdraw. Without a certain degree of trust in others, social life would be impossible. Hence, too high levels of deviance, to the extent that they undermine basic trust, undermine the very possibility of collective life.
Although the destructive possibilities of high levels of deviance must be kept firmly in mind in any sociological analysis, it would be a major mistake to conclude from this that all deviance is necessarily dysfunctional. Just as Durkheim showed in his classical analysis that a certain amount of crime in a society is not only "normal" but has positive functions for that society, so it is necessary to stress that certain degrees of deviance may make positive contributions to the vitality of smaller groups and social systems alike.
The chapter that follows does not aim at presenting a full inventory of all possible functions of deviance. It attempts, instead, to sensitize the sociological reader to the need for further search for such functions by analyzing at least some of them. Among the latent functional contributions examined here are the role of the deviant in arousing the community to the consequences of the breach of its norms, and the fact that deviance may be considered the very "ground" of normalcy. Various structural and situational circumstances that lead the group to tolerate or even to foster deviance are considered. Criminal deviance is distinguished from nonconformist innovating behavior; and various types of innovating departures from normalcy are considered from the dual viewpoint of structurally-induced motivation and of impact on group structure.
MOST CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIZING ABOUT deviant behavior has tended to focus on mechanisms of social control. The analysis of instances in which behavior that violates institutional expectations may be considered functional for an ongoing social system has been largely neglected. This paper tries to highlight some functions of deviance for social structures. This does not deny, of course, the dysfunctions of deviance, but only suggests that an exclusive emphasis on these may result in inadequate and distorted analysis. 3
CONSEQUENCES OF DEVIANCE FOR INTERNAL GROUP RELATIONS
We have known ever since Durkheim that crime alerts the common conscience and contributes to the revival and maintenance of common sentiments by arousing the community to the consequences of infringements of rules. "Crime," he wrote, "brings together upright consciences and concentrates them." 4 It will also be remembered that Mead wrote in a similar vein: "The criminal ... is responsible for a sense of solidarity, aroused among those whose attitude would otherwise be centered upon interests quite divergent from each other." "The attitude of hostility toward the lawbreaker has the
unique advantage of uniting all members of the community." 5 Durkheim and Mead both state that, though an individual criminal act elicits negative sanctions, crime also has positive consequences for the society or group since the breach of a norm calls attention to its importance for the common weal. Like bodily pain serves as a danger signal calling for the mobilization of energies against the source of disease, so crime, these writers argue, alerts the body social and leads to the mobilization of otherwise inactive defense mechanisms.
Durkheim and Mead are often quoted in current theorizing, yet their pertinent insight on the functions of crime has been somewhat neglected. Thus Parsons focuses attention on mechanisms of social control that serve to check deviant behavior but fails to consider possible contributions that deviance may make to the system in which it occurs. He distinguishes types of deviance that "fall within the range of permissiveness which should be considered normal to people under certain strains" and "a vicious circle of gratification of deviant wishes [leading to the] undermining of the main value system." 6 But he does not consider those deviant acts that, though not considered "normal to people under strain," reinforce rather than undermine the social system. We shall see in a later part of this paper that different types of deviant behavior must be discussed in terms of their differential impact. Even if we should agree, for the purpose of discussion, that deviants are always motivated to defy the group's norms, nothing requires us to assume that such
acts may not have the unanticipated consequence of strengthening those norms.
Durkheim and Mead see the functional consequences of deviance in the strengthening of the group that results from the collective rejection of the deviant. This assumption is indeed borne out by much of small-group research. An article summarizing much of the research findings in this field states, for example: "When a member deviates markedly from a group standard, the remaining members of the group bring pressures to bear on the deviate to bring him back to conformity. If pressure is of no avail, the deviate is rejected and cast out of the group." 7 Statements such as these seem to imply, though the authors do not explicitly say so, that deviations from standards lead to the mobilization of the group's energies. But small-group research has not adequately considered the possibility that the repression of deviance may not in all cases be functional for the group. Moreover, it has not been shown that all types of groups will reject deviance under all circumstances. These two variables--"strengthening of the group" and "rejection of the deviant"--call attention to four possible cases: (1) the deviant is opposed and the group is strengthened--the situation discussed by Durkheim and Mead; (2) the deviant is tolerated or even accepted and the group is strengthened; (3) the deviant is rejected and the group is weakened; and (4) the deviant is not rejected and the group is weakened. The last case is relatively unproblematical, but the other three have not been given sufficient systematic attention in sociological theorizing, although empirical evidence about them is available.
1. The deviant is opposed and the group is strengthened.
In the process of uniting itself against deviance, the community
not only revives and maintains common sentiments but creatively
establishes moral rules and redefines "normal" behavior.
"Each time the community brings sanctions against a detail of
behavior ... it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and
redefines the boundaries within which the norm exercises its
special jurisdiction."
8
Thus the criminal, the scapegoat, the mentally
ill, in their diverse ways, allow the group to reaffirm not
only its social but also its moral identity, for they establish signposts
which serve as normative yardsticks.
9
Deviance "establishes
the point beyond which behavior is no longer within
acceptable reach of the norm, and in this way gives substance
and authority to the norm itself."
10
Thus, definition of what is considered normal in the group
takes place with reference to what is considered deviant, and
morality is given its content through the contrast provided by
that which is not moral. We touch here upon a dialectical relation
that Gestalt psychology has discussed in detail with respect
to perception. Figures cannot be perceived except in relation to
grounds setting them off. In the same way, normalcy can hardly
be perceived except against the ground of deviance; to be
"good" makes sense only in relation to being "bad."
It is with the body social as it is with individuals: Moral
indignation against deviants serves to purge the righteous from
a sense of their own sins and unworthiness and helps sustain
their moral identity. Such indignation may well serve as a reaction-formation,
securing the ego against the repressed impulse
to identify with the criminal.
11
It is against the ground of criminal
deviance that the righteous achieve the comforting affirmation
of their normality. Inasmuch as "our" innocence is contingent
upon "their" guilt, dereliction by others provides
occasion for self-congratulations.
But dereliction by others also provides occasion for self-examination.
Thus, when a crime is committed in the community,
religious leaders use the occasion to exhort the congregation
to reexamine themselves and "purify their souls."
Deviance is taken as a warning that there is something foul in
the state of Denmark that needs correction--correction not
only on the individual level but in the social realm as well.
Thus, Stewart and Helen Perry have shown that in the mental
hospitals deviant patients may, by their acting out, "act as a fire
alarm for the ward." By upsetting the social equilibrium of the
ward, the "fire-alarm patient" may highlight such defects as
understaffing, staff overwork, and the like and thus dramatize
the need for remedial action.
12
Bureaucratic organizations are
familiar with similar situations in which the failure effectively
to control behavior in terms of official goals will be used by
practitioners as a convincing means for appealing for increased
resources. Thus many organizations (as well as many role incumbents)
have a vested interest, though rarely acknowledged,
in the very deviant behavior that they are set up to combat, for
deviance provides the reason for their existence: Increases in
deviance may help them to highlight the need for strengthening
the organization (or the department in the organization) to
cope more effectively with disturbing behavior.
2. What has been said so far about reactions to deviance--
be it a spontaneous, that is, a non-deliberate "pulling together"
of group members, or deliberate policy--refers to those instances
in which deviant behavior leads to its rejection. The
second case is that of tolerance or acceptance of the deviant with
concomitant strengthening of the group. There are groups in
which deviants provide the occasion for a reaffirmation of values
without incurring rejection. Thus in a seminal paper, Dentler
and Erikson give illustrations from Quaker work camps and
Army Basic Training Squads where deviants do indeed "become
critical referents for establishing the end points (of the range of
possibilities judged permissible within the group's boundaries)"
--the figure-ground effect discussed earlier--and where "the
deviant is someone about whom something should be done, and
the group, in expressing this concern, is able to affirm its essential
cohesion and indicate what the group is and what it can
do."
13
However, in these cases the occasion for affirmation of cohesion
does not come from rejecting the deviant but rather from
protecting him: he "becomes the ward of the group.... In a
setting in which having buddies is highly valued, he is unlikely
to receive any sociometric choices at all. But it would be quite
unfortunate to assume that he is therefore isolated from the
group or repudiated by it: an accurate sociogram would have
the deviant individual encircled by the interlocking sociometric
preferences, sheltered by the group structure."
14
It would seem that in some groups tolerance of deviance is
a function of a specific value system: among Quakers, "tolerance"
is a salient component of the ideology. In tolerating or
protecting a deviant, they practice what they publicly profess.
(It may even be said that such groups do, in fact, need social
objects upon whom "tolerance" can be exercised because they
provide the occasion for testing and confirming their values.)
If it is objected that tolerance of deviance in army units is
merely a manifestation of opposition to official army goals, that
is, part of a collective effort to "get back" at army authority, this
only confirms the analytical point: by setting itself off against
an intolerant environment, the group exercises tolerance precisely
with regard to those individuals who would otherwise be
the victims of the very environment whose values the group rejects.
In both cases--Quaker camps and army units--acceptance
of deviance is contingent upon the value system of the group.
What Kelley and Thibault say about the rejection of deviance
applies to its tolerance as well: "Generally, the same factors responsible
for the emergence of group standards will also in
large measure be responsible for the motivations to enforce conformity
to them."
15
Thus in the groups discussed by Dentler and
Erikson, the practice of tolerance--whether positively stated as
a "way of life" as among Quakers, or stated in opposition to the
intolerance of army authorities as in army units--would seem
to be a basis for the emergence or strengthening of group standards
and would therefore be the guiding principle that motivates
the responses of group members to non-conformity among
them.
3. So far, the assertion has been made that deviants offer to
group members the opportunity to reaffirm common values, be
it by providing an occasion to oppose them collectively (case
1), or by bringing about a situation in which their acceptance
or tolerance serves as an affirmation of beliefs held in common
(case 2). In these cases, the groups were strengthened. There are
groups, however, for whom rigid and repeated rejection of
deviants has serious dysfunctional consequences (case 3). Rigidly
structured sects or radical political organizations of the
sectarian type provide examples in point. Even a cursory perusal
of the history of the Trotskyist movement leaves no doubt about
the fart that the lack of ability to tolerate deviance led to
further and further fragmentation of the movement. Religious
sects provide similar examples.
To be sure, in such groups each single case of negative sanctions against deviant behavior led, at the moment the act of sanctioning occurred, to a reaffirmation of values among those who remained faithful. Yet, rejection of nonconformity as an ongoing organizational activity was disruptive as a process in that in the long run it weakened the group in relation to its external environment.
This calls attention to the need to consider the relation between the group within which deviance occurs and the external context.
CONSEQUENCES OF DEVIANCE FOR GROUP RELATIONS WITH THE OUTSIDE
In the first two situations discussed--one of rejection and the other of tolerance of the deviant--our concern was with relationships within the group. It now turns out that what may
be functional for the group in one respect--that is, the reaffirmation of its norms--may turn out to be detrimental in another respect, namely, in its relation to the outside. To consider only the internal consequences of deviance and of responses to it, that is, to limit analysis to the group processes within given subsystems without paying attention to the group's relations with the outside, is a common pitfall in sociological theorizing, especially in small-group research. In contrast to much of such research, Kelley and Shapiro set up an experimental group in a situation in which the group's norms were discordant with outside reality. 16 In this situation conformity to these norms tended to be detrimental to the success of the group. (Situations similar to those contrived in the laboratory are likely to occur when disparate rates of change impinge on a group and lead to cultural lags and dysfunctional resistances of vested interests.)
It turned out that in these experimental groups deviation from the norms did not call forth rejection. This case is, in this respect, more similar to case 2 discussed above, for here also deviance is accepted. Whereas in the Quaker camps deviance may be implicitly welcomed as an occasion for group members to live up to professed values, in these experimental groups deviant behavior seems to have been explicitly welcomed as an occasion for better adaptability to outside reality. Indeed, it turned out that in these groups persons who deviated from the group's norms were also those who were judged to be highly acceptable as co-workers.
A consideration of the external environment for the understanding of internal dynamics of deviance and responses to it makes it possible to throw more light on the behavior of the Quaker camps and army units discussed earlier. There also the
relation with the outside would seem to be one important determinant of inside responses: In Quaker groups and army camps alike, the norms that guide the behavior of members toward deviants seemed to consist in countervalues to patterns prevailing on the outside. Thus in Kelley and Thibault's groups, as in the groups studied by Dentler and Erikson, outside reality was an important determinant--whether as a spur for adaptation or for opposition to it--of the responses to deviant behavior within.
The evidence so far indicates that the widely accepted notion that groups always reject deviance is, at the least, open to question. To be sure, deviance may be proscribed as in the examples of criminal behavior used by Durkheim and Mead. Yet, a deviant redefinition of norms may be permitted, as when the value system of the group prescribes tolerance. It may be preferred, as when it is accepted as a means for better adaptability of the group. 17
Deviant behavior may also be prescribed, as during periodic feasts when the participants are expected to infringe the norms of ordinary behavior. 18 These, however, are instances where it would be deviant not to deviate; that is, they are special instances of conformity that do not concern us here.
The recognition that departure from the norms may be preferred, permitted, or proscribed raises two related problems: (1) The license to deviate is differentially distributed among members of a group. For example, there is tolerance of deviance for special role incumbents such as the "star," the "stranger," or
the "fool"; 19 or there is some expectation of deviance for some group leaders who are supposed to be flexible and to depart from the norms to further the tasks of the group. (2) Another important problem raised by the differential response to deviance is the need to distinguish between different types of deviant behavior.
DEVIANCE AND INNOVATION
So far the concept of deviance has been used here in accordance with its definition in most contemporary sociological work. 20 An overarching concept of this kind has the distinct merit of drawing attention to the structural similarities of a variety of behaviors which might otherwise seem but little related. Yet at the same time, it has the disadvantage of obscuring distinctions which might be crucial in certain contexts. 21 Thus Merton distinguishes nonconformity from such other kinds of deviant behavior as crime or juvenile delinquency. Criminal
behavior is impelled by private and self-centered motives that are by definition antisocial. Innovating dissent of a nonconforming minority, on the other hand, may be manifestly intended to serve group interests in a more effective manner than the conforming majority. "These kinds of `deviant behavior' differ structurally, culturally and functionally." 22
Although both the nonconformist and the criminal defy normative expectations, they are profoundly dissimilar: the nonconformist's dissent "is not a private dereliction, but a thrust toward a new morality (or a restoration of an old and almost forgotten morality)...." 23 I have argued elsewhere in a similar vein that "When all forms of dissent are [considered] criminal by definition, we are in the presence of a system which is ill-equipped to reveal fully the extent to which nonconformity, as distinct from crime, involves the striving toward an alternative moral basis rather than moral deviation." 24
To be sure, the behavior of the nonconformist may bring forth community reactions similar to those occasioned by criminal violations of the norms, yet the innovations he proposes allegedly in the interest of the group's welfare are likely to be evaluated in their own right, if only by a minority. This is why, as distinct from the case of the criminal, there is likely to be buried under layers of hostility a certain measure of respect for the disinterested dissenter. Being oriented toward the collectivity, he is led to seek and to find an audience within it. The innovator sends a message intended to be picked up and diffused. His behavior proceeds, so to speak, in broad daylight in
order to attract a maximum audience. Whereas the criminal seeks to minimize the chances of detection, the innovator seeks maximum publicity for his message. One may argue with an innovator but hardly with a criminal. 25
Just as with various types of deviance, the innovations that the nonconformist proposes for the consideration of the group may be prescribed or proscribed with various degrees of tolerance, depending on the structured and normative context. Moreover, they may be wittingly favored by the group or the group may unwittingly be favored by them.
When innovation is highly valued, as, for example, in scientific societies, innovating behavior must be considered a special type of conformity rather than deviation. In the context of the institution of science, innovations and discoveries, provided they satisfy the criteria of evidence, are highly valued variants that permit the goals of the group to be more adequately met-- though even here the innovator may at first encounter the resistance of vested interests. 26
On the other hand, in groups that place no value on innovation, an innovating response will be considered truly nonconformist. In contrast to the case of the criminal, however, at least some of the group's members might perceive that the innovator intends to perform a positive task for the group. This might then lead to a conflict within the group over the issue raised. If this happens, the innovator has transformed individual
nonconformity into group conflict and has raised it from the idiosyncratic to the collective level.
Thus, pressures for innovation are likely to result in the emergence of social conflicts within a system. Such conflicts, as I have shown elsewhere, may be highly functional for that system. 27 Dewey has noted that "conflict shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving ... it is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity." 28 The innovator's behavior may serve to reduce the chances that adherence to the routines of yesterday render the group unable to meet the challenges of today. The innovator may thus be a pace-setter and a setter of new standards. By attacking vested interests in the habitual, the innovator helps insure that the group does not stifle in the deadening routines of ritualism.
What is said here of group processes indeed applies to every productive interaction as well. Interaction does not merely consist of mutual filling of expectations but in ever renewed innovating contributions. In much current theorizing it is assumed that the equilibrium of a group is a function of the extent to which group members habitually conform to each other's expectations. The maintenance of complementarity between the interaction orientations of alter and ego is said to be the mark of a stable social system. 29 "This model seems to assume," Gouldner has noted, "that each of a sequence of identical conforming acts will yield either the same or an increasing degree of appreciation and satisfaction and will thus elicit the same or increasing amounts of reward." 30 Yet, "later conforming actions are worth
less than earlier ones, in terms of the rewards or propensity to reciprocate which they elicit." When conformity is taken for granted, the propensity to reciprocate is weakened in the long run. Homans also states this principle of satiation, a version of marginal utility: "The more often a man has in the recent past received a rewarding activity from an other, the less valuable any further unit of that activity becomes to him." 31
The Finnish sociologist Yrjö Littunen has formulated an "optimal frustration" hypothesis: "Persons who have to maintain a monotonous interaction pattern for a long period of time tend to become bored with each other. This phenomenon of social fatigue may be understood as a situation where there is no excitement in the interaction to maintain the cohesiveness, to increase liking." 32 Although sustained conformity may bring the reward of smooth adjustment to expectations, it also brings the penalty of boredom. That is why apathy and monotony may lead a person to "seek a frustration which his energy potential can adequately balance and overcome." 33 This hypothesis, which Littunen developed on the basis of the psychological research of Hebb and Thompson, 34 gains added theoretical relevance with Gouldner's recognition that a system built upon the habituation of conforming responses may be said to contain built-in tendencies
toward a high level of entropy. It is high social entropy that the innovator, as an agent of change, helps to prevent.
NORMATIVE FLEXIBILITY AND INNOVATING ROLES
In monolithic structures role requirements may be so rigidly defined that only fully conforming role performance will be tolerated; in less rigid structures, on the other hand, a measure of diversity may be tolerated at various levels in the system. 35 For example, low-ranking deviants may perform important functions for the group. This was the case in the groups discussed earlier, about which Dentler and Erikson have argued that low-ranking members who deviate from the group's norms "become critical referents for establishing the end points" of the range of possibilities judged permissible within the group's boundaries. 36
Such considerations direct attention to the relation between status, group structure, and the acceptance of innovation by the group.
Deviant behavior as well as innovation varies within different social structures. Furthermore, the social structure puts pressure on some of its status-occupants to engage in innovating rather than in conforming behavior. 37 For example, as Veblen
and Simmel, 38 among others, have pointed out, marginal individuals are likely to be highly motivated to engage in innovating behavior because they are structurally induced to depart from prevailing social norms. "With the least opportunity for full participation in the most valued activities of their own society," 39 they may be stimulated to make new responses that depart from the habitually required. Being less tied to the system of wont and use that regulates the lives of insiders, they may see alternatives of action that escape the latter's attention. The structural circumstance of their exclusion from some of the prized values of the group may make the marginal man more sensitive to the lacunae that may well remain hidden from "well-adjusted" members of the group. If he wishes to gain acceptance among insiders, he will be motivated to propose innovating means designed to allow the group to reach its goals more effectively than before.
There are also positions in a group other than those of marginal men that motivate innovating departures from the norms. For example, the status of leader requires the ability to adjust to new circumstances. The rank and file may take the customary for granted, but a break of wont and use may enhance the reputation of the leader. The flexibility required in leadership roles may entail greater or lesser departures from otherwise expected behavior so that a certain amount of license to deviate and to violate norms is built into the very definition of leadership.
Homans, who had argued in an earlier work that "the higher the rank (or status) of a person within a group, the more nearly his activities conform to the norms of the group," 40 stated more recently, after discussing, among others, the above-quoted study by Kelley and Shapiro, that "we now have experimental evidence that it is not just the members of low status, but members of high status as well, who are prone at times to non-conformity." 41 It will be remembered that in these groups deviant behavior helped the group to adapt to the outside. This suggests that the pressure on the leader to engage in innovating behavior may derive from the structural circumstance that he is the group's representative to the outside. He stands at the point of interchange between in-group and out-group. A leader may be considered a special case of the marginal man: having the task to relate his group to the demands of the environment, he is oriented, at the same time as he is the group's representative, toward extra-group values.
In view of these requirements of leadership, it is not always clear whether the leader's innovation can be called "deviant" at all. Though it involves adoption of new procedures, innovation in this case still takes place within normative limits. Just as with
groups in which innovation is highly prized, so in situations in which the leader's departure from institutionalized procedures is part of the system of expectations, what may be considered deviation from one point of view may well be considered conforming behavior from another.
Yet leaders are often also permitted some deviant behavior that neither increases the group's adaptation to the outside nor otherwise directly benefits the group in any way. Simply by virtue of otherwise showing prized qualities, a leader accumulates what Hollander has called "idiosyncrasy credit." 42
One would assume that the more task-oriented a group, the less its tolerance of deviant behavior that interferes with the attainment of the group's goal. This may well be so, but if a leader is seen as important for the attainment of these goals, or even for their partial attainment, the group may tolerate individual deviation when it is seen as balanced by positive contributions. A man may lose credit for deviations, but only when his credit balance is exhausted will he be removed. If he continues to amass credit in the eyes of the members through group-approved activities, he attains a threshold permitting deviations from common expectations. This may explain, at least in part, why a leader may be given greater leeway for deviating behavior than his followers: His having accumulated highly visible merit gives him a leeway in behavior not granted to less meritorious members; the group will take from "him" what it will not take from "them." Task orientation and tolerance of deviance are therefore not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The term "idiosyncrasy credit" readily brings to mind the image of a "would-be" innovator, who is tolerated because of other contributions, yet whose innovating message is largely
ignored by the group. This is not necessarily so. "Idiosyncrasy credit" because of high achievement does not merely imply high tolerance of otherwise unacceptable behavior; it also implies that members of the group will listen more readily.
THE TIME DIMENSION OF INNOVATION
Innovations must not only be analyzed in terms of the structural circumstances under which they occur but also in terms of their impact over time. They must be located in social time as well as in social space.
A type of behavior that might at first be perceived by the group as an attack on its norms and values might at a later time be considered in a different light. If this happens during the lifetime of the innovator he is likely to experience a sharp change in status; he will then reap the rewards of an action that was at first negatively sanctioned. The innovator is then co-opted, perhaps even against his will, into the ranks of the upholders of conformity. If, on the other hand, he obtains recognition only after his death, the lifelong heretic becomes, in effect, a posthumous saint. The Catholic church, with its amazing flexibility, has been especially adept at this process of social transmutation in which, through a remarkable alchemy, its victims have been transformed into patron saints so that Joan of Arc in due time became Saint Joan. As Merton has observed: "In the history of every society ... some of its cultural heroes have been regardeds as heroic precisely because they have had the courage and the vision to depart from norms then obtaining in the group. As we all know, the rebel, revolutionary, nonconformist, individualist, heretic, and renegade of an earlier time is often the culture hero of today." 43 The Jewish prophets, those holy demagogues, were feared, despised, and outcast by the religious and secular powers
of their day. Yet, as Max Weber has noted, "it is completely inconceivable that without a profound experience of a confirmation of the prophetic words of doom ... the belief of the people was not only unbroken by the fearful political fate, but in a unique and quite unheard of historical paradox was definitely confirmed. The entire inner construction of the Old Testament is inconceivable without its orientation in terms of the oracles of the prophets. These giants cast their shadows through the millennia into the present." 44
Note: * I borrow this phrase from Bruce Mazlish's characterization of the Hegelian dialectic in his The Riddle of History, New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 147.
Note: 1. Albert Cohen, Deviance and Control, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall Inc., 1966, pp. 4-5. Cohen is among the relatively few writers on deviance who are well aware of its positive as well as its negative contributions.
Note: 1. This paper was substantially completed during the author's stay at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway, under a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship. I wish to express my appreciation to a number of European colleagues, too numerous to mention, whose critical reading of an earlier draft of this paper was most helpful. I owe a special debt to Johan Galtung, of the University of Oslo and the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, to Yrjö Littunen, School of Social Sciences, Tampere, Finland, and to Robert K. Merton, of Columbia University, who made a number of very valuable suggestions.
Note: 2. Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society, New York, The Free Press, 1947, p. 102.
Note: 3. George Herbert Mead, "The Psychology of Punitive Justice," American Journal of Sociology, XXIII (1928), 557-602, esp. p. 591. Cf. also Marx's parallel formulation: "The criminal produces an impression now moral, now tragic, and renders a `service' by arousing the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public." Quoted in Bottomore and Rubel (eds.), Karl Marx, London, Watts & Co., 1956, p. 159.
Note: 4. Talcott Parsons, The Social System, New York, The Free Press, 1951, p. 512.
Note: 5. Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibault, "Experimental Studies of Group Problem Solving and Process" in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner Lindzey, Cambridge, Mass., Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1954, II, 768.
Note: 6. Kai T. Erikson, "Social Margins: Some Notes on the Sociology of Deviance" (paper read at the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1960).
Note: 7. W. E. H. Lecky wrote about the prostitute: "herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue" (quoted by Kingsley Davis, "Prostitution" in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet [eds.], Contemporary Social Problems, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961, pp. 262-88). Davis shows the close connection between prostitution and the maintenance of traditional family patterns.
Note: 8. Erikson, op. cit. Cf. also V. W. Turner's parallel formulation: "The norm derives strength and definition from condemnation of its breach in the public situations of ritual and law. The deviant, the haphazard and the contingent can only be recognized to be such where consensus to what is typical, orthodox, regular exists. And vice versa" (Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1957, P. 329). This is of course what Hegel meant when he asserted that "no step in philosophy was possible" unless it was recognized that the positive and the negative gain their "truth only in their relation to each other so that each contains the other within it" (Wissenschaft der Logik, Lasson ed., Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1923, II, 54-56).
Note: 9. Cf. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, New York, International Universities Press, 1946, pp. 117 ff.
Note: 10. Stewart E. Perry and Helen Swick Perry, "Deviant Behavior, Function and Dysfunction on the Psychiatric Ward" (paper read at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings, April 23-24, 1960, Boston, Mass.).
Note: 11. Robert A. Dentler and Kai T. Erikson, "The Functions of Deviance in Groups," Social Problems, VII, No. 2 (Fall, 1959), 98-107.
Note: 12. Ibid., p. 105.
Note: 13. Kelley and Thibault, op. cit., p. 766.
Note: 14. Harold H. Kelley and Martin M. Shapiro, "An Experiment on Conformity to Group Norms Where Conformity Is Detrimental to Group Achievement." American Sociological Review, XIX (1954), 667-77.
Note: 15. These variations in social control have been identified and discussed by Robert K. Merton in his "Social Structure and Anomie," Social Theory and Social Structure (rev. ed.), New York, The Free Press, 1957, esp. p. 133.
Note: 16. Roger Caillois, "Theory of the Festival" in Man and the Sacred, New York, Free Press, 1959.
Note: 17. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff, New York, The Free Press, 1950; and Orrin E. Klapp, "The Fool as a Social Type," American Journal of Sociology, LV (1949), 157-62.
Note: 18. Cf. Albert K. Cohen, "The Study of Social Organization and Deviant Behavior," in Sociology Today, ed. Merton et al., New York: Basic Books, 1959, pp. 461-84.
Note: 19 It was a distinct step forward to conceptualize the sick and the criminal as deviants from the institutionalized norms on the ground that both roles called forth social control mechanisms designed to restore "health." Nevertheless, as Vilhelm Aubert and Sheldon Messinger have recently argued ("The Criminal and the Sick," Inquiry [Oslo], 1, No. 3 [Autumn, 1958], 137-60), these roles are also crucially dissimilar insofar as, among other things, the sick is conceived as one who cannot be held responsible for his failure to perform previously assumed roles, while the criminal is not perceived in terms of inability but rather as having been able to act differently had he chosen to do so.
Note: 20. Merton, op. cit., p. 360. Cf. also his "Social Problems and Sociological Theory" in Merton and Nisbet (eds.), op. cit., pp. 697-737.
Note: 21. Merton, op. cit., p. 363 et passim.
Note: 22. "Durkheim's Conservatism and Its Implications for Sociological Theory," in this volume. Cf. also Roger Nett, "Conformity-Deviation and the Social Control Concept," Ethics, LXIV (1953), 38-45.
Note: 23. Gandhi distinguished between criminal and civil disobedience in terms of the concept of publicity. Civil disobedience, to him, was by definition public action.
Note: 24. Cf. Robert K. Merton, "Social Conformity, Deviation and Opportunity-Structures," American Sociological Review, XXIV, No. 2 (April, 1959). 177-89. esp. p. 181. Cf. also Herbert Menzel, "Innovation, Integration, and Marginality," American Sociological Review, XXV, No. 5 (October, 1960), 704-13.
Note: 25. "Social Conflict and the Theory of Social Change," in this volume.
Note: 26. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, New York, Modern Library, 1930, p. 300.
Note: 27. Talcott Parsons, op. cit., pp. 204-5 et passim.
Note: 28. Alvin M. Gouldner, "Organizational Analysis," in Sociology Today, pp. 423 ff.
Note: 29. George Homans, Social Behavior, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961, p. 55.
Note: 30. Income-Security Values at Different Levels of Frustration (Transactions of the Westermarck Society, IV, No. 4, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1959), pp. 234-35 ff. Cf. also Goethe's "Nichts ist schwerer zu ertragen als eine Reihe von schoenen Tagen."
Note: 31. Littunen, op. cit., p. 224. Cf. also Marx's statement: "The criminal interrupts the monotony and security of bourgeois life. Thus he protects it from stagnation" (op. cit., p. 159).
Note: 32. D. O. Hebb and W. R. Thompson, "The Social Significance of Animal Studies," in Handbook of Social Psychology, 1, 532-61.
Note: 33. Daniel J. Levinson, "Role, Personality, and Social Structure in the Organizational Setting," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, LVIII (1959). 170-80. Cf. also Erving Goffman's discussion of "Role Distance" in his Encounters, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961.
Note: 34. Op. cit. Cf. also E. Paul Torrance, "Function of Expressed Disagreement in Small Group Processes" in A. Rubenstein and C. Haberstroh (eds.), Some Theories of Organization, Homewood, Ill., Dorsey Press, 1960, pp. 250-57.
Note: 35. Robert K. Merton, "Social Structure and Anomie," op. cit., pp. 131-60.
Note: 36. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," op. cit.; and Thorstein Veblen, "The Intellectual Preeminence of the Jews," in his Essays in Our Changing Order, pp. 219-31.
Note: 37. H. G. Barnett, Innovation--the Basis of Cultural Change, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1953, p. 404. Cf. also Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940, esp. pp. 56-57, as well as Robert Park's "Introduction" to E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937.
Note: 38. Homans, The Human Group, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950, p. 141.
Note: 39. Social Behavior, p. 346. Recent experimental work throws doubt on the idea that the relation between status and conformity is ever a simple one. J. E. Dittes and H. H. Kelley showed, e. g., that individuals who felt acceptable in a group felt freer to express disagreements publicly, while those with a low sense of acceptance were much higher in their public than in their private conformity "Effects of Different Conditions of Acceptance upon Conformity to Group Norms," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, LIII [1956], 100-107). Cf. also Herbert Menzel, "Public and Private Conformity under Different Conditions of Acceptance in the Group," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, LV (1957), 398-402.
Note: 40. E. P. Hollander, "Conformity, Status and Idiosyncrasy Credit," Psychological Review, LXV (1958), 117-27.
Note: 41. Merton, Social Theory, p. 183.
Note: 42. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale, New York, The Free Press, 1952, p. 334.