Question

What role does power and social class play in how deviance is perceived and treated in our society? Discuss a specific example of a case where social class or social status influenced how a deviant individual was perceived and treated, including evaluation of the consequences for the individual and for society

Answer 1

Answer- Devience is behaviour that violates social norms and arouses negative social reaction. Social controls Devience in two ways ; formal and informal social controls. Generally informal social control is used to control the behaviour that violates informal norms and formal socal control is used to control the formal norms. Social control is never perfect. So government controls it through legal actions and laws and regulations. Anger is best example of informal way to control the informal norms.Power plays important role in explanation of how Devience is perceived. Devience is the struggle between the haves at the top of society with social, economical and political power and the haves nots in the bottom. Accordingly, they assumes that those with powers pass laws and and otherwise use legal system to secure the position at the top of the society and to keep the powerless on the bottom.

Answer 2

Power and Social Class:

Societies draw lines in the sand somewhere when it comes to what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Whether it be murder or just poor manners, someone is going to land on the wrong side of a boundary, thus illustrating the need for the line to be drawn.

Deviance, in a sociological context, describes actions or behaviors that violate social norms, including formally-enacted rules, as well as informal violations of social norms. In sociology, conflict theories are perspectives that emphasize the social, political, or material inequality of a social group, that critique the broad socio-political system, or that otherwise detract from structural functionalism and ideological conservativism. Conflict theories draw attention to power differentials, such as class conflict, and generally contrast historically dominant ideologies. It is therefore a macro level analysis of society. Karl Marx is the father of the social conflict theory, which is a component of the four paradigms of sociology.

The group in a given society that has a lot of power will have a major role in defining what acts are deviant. But for this to work most people must acknowledge that power. That is, they they must recognize or feel that that power is legitimate that the state, or those in control have authority over them. This is an important distinction between force and coercion (i.e. raw power without recognition or consent of the people) and legitimate authority where people recognize and acknowledge the power over them. Certainly, we can understand and agree with this when examining the broad varieties of societies that exist in the world today. Cannibalism is socially approved in some societies, while it is taboo in others.

Society defines deviance is important because doing so creates norms that inform members as to what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable. While it’s easy to think we either fall on one side of the line or the other, a closer look at rituals and the release of deviant desire in various societies shows that at some point or another, the vast majority of people go for a walk on the deviant side of that line.