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The Sociology Of Deviance: An Obituary By Erich Goode

736 Words3 Pages

Deviance and its role in shaping norms and reactions is a fundamental component of every person’s experience in societal life regardless of the active mutability of society and values. In the article “Does the Death of the Sociology of Deviance Claim Make Sense?” Sociologist Erich Goode dissects Colin Sumner’s “The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary” and his claim that the sociology of deviance is dead. Goode makes six different points, all varying in importance and applicability, as to why he believes Sumner’s claims are false and that the study of deviance is alive and well. Although certain points of Goode’s seem relatively unimportant, his argument that the field of deviance holds validity and successfully identifies the flaws in Sumner’s …show more content…

Goode spends a brief portion of his article diving into deviance itself and defines it as the study of real or presumed violations of expectations (Goode 108). Furthermore, it is a universal truth that deviance exists within every crevice of human connection and underlies all that defines what is right and wrong. As good is to bad, so conformity is to deviance and one cannot identify what is morally just without defining what is morally deviant. Deviance and the study of deviance are inherently different, however, because deviance is a real-world spectacle that can be observed while the latter is simply the supposed violation of norms and their potential reactions (Goode 108). Nonetheless, where deviance is present there will always be a tendency to observe and study its nature and Goode argues that imagining that deviance will disappear if sociologists stop studying it indicates magical and wishful thinking (Goode 108). Because of the undeniable intermingling of sociology and deviance, Goode’s argument that the charges that are being made against sociology are the same as those that are trying to bury the study of deviance is overall sound and strips several of Sumner’s claims to be at best

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