Durkheim argued every society needs its rule-breakers
It sounds backwards, but the sociologist Émile Durkheim claimed deviance is normal and even necessary. Without vice there is nothing to define virtue against, and without crime no idea of justice. Punishing rule-breakers draws people together, and pushing against boundaries is often how societies change.
Sociologists define deviance as breaking social norms, whether formal ones written into law or informal ones such as everyday customs. The first kind is crime; the second covers minor breaches of unwritten rules. Deviance is not automatically bad, since some rule-breaking is judged positive. It is also relative: an act punished in one culture or era may be ordinary in another, and even the prohibition on killing is suspended by governments in war or accepted in self-defence.
The strongest prohibitions are taboos, subjects so condemned that people barely mention them. The word comes from the Tongan tapu, meaning forbidden. Taboos are not universal, but most societies have them, and breaking one brings shame and humiliation, sometimes legal penalties as well.
Durkheim listed four functions of deviance: it affirms shared values, marks moral boundaries so people learn right from wrong, unites people in a common reaction, and stretches those boundaries in ways that lead to change. He tied it to the collective conscience, the shared norms members of a society follow, and to extremes of integration into groups and regulation by social rules. Robert Merton built on this with strain theory. For him, anomie arises when the goals a culture celebrates cannot be reached through the legitimate means available, and the frustration can drive people toward deviant paths.
Other thinkers focus on perception. The labelling theorist Howard Becker sorted people into four categories depending on whether they break rules and whether others think they do: the falsely accused, the purely deviant, the conforming, and the secretly deviant who break rules unnoticed. Deviance can also be a statement of identity, a way of rejecting the dominant culture in favour of a subculture.
Source: Deviance (sociology)
