Quote for the Week

This is one of my all time favourites -its so radical, such a turning on its head of our conventional ways of thinking. What do you make of it?

” Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’.

Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, Free Press, New York, 1963.

Yes, I know - you’ve only just got to grips with the quote from last Friday - gosh these weeks go quickly. I’ll try to get the quote of the week on a more regular basis to keep the ‘spacing’ about right.