Deviance

Deviance

Introduction

The term deviance emerged in the United States after the Second World War. The new concept reflected that period's interest in macro-sociological, functionalist Grand Theory (Sumner, 2004). Talcott Parsons was one of the first to use the word in an article in a major journal. Deviance was a sociological abstraction; it referred to rule breaking or violations of important social norms that might lead to social control sanctions (Durkheim, 2002). Its proponents anticipated the concept of deviance would help analysts recognize similarities among different sorts of rule breaking within the social system.

Body

The term deviance had its roots in statistics, where deviation ...