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Interactionism (also termed labelling theory or social-reaction theory) approaches crime and deviance from a fundamentally different starting point to the structuralist perspectives of functionalism and Marxism. Where structural theories ask "what social conditions cause people to commit crime?", interactionists turn the question inside out and ask: "why are some people and some acts defined as criminal or deviant, while others — sometimes more harmful — are not?" Crime is treated not as a fixed, objective category but as the outcome of a social process in which the agencies of social control — police, courts, media, schools and other institutions — define, detect and respond to behaviour. The methodological corollary is profound: if crime is socially constructed by the reactions of others, then official crime statistics cannot be read as a transparent record of "real" crime, but must be analysed as a product of the decisions of the agencies that compile them. This lesson examines the labelling tradition through Becker, Lemert, Cicourel, Young, Stan Cohen and Braithwaite, before evaluating its strengths and the serious objections raised against it.
Key Definition: Labelling is the process by which certain individuals and behaviours are defined as criminal or deviant by those with the power to make the definition stick. A label is not a neutral description: when it becomes a master status, it overrides all other aspects of a person's identity and reshapes how others — and eventually the labelled person — see them.
This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) Paper 3: Crime and Deviance specification requirement that students understand labelling theory and interactionist approaches, the social construction of crime and deviance, and the social construction of official crime statistics. The material is central to the Paper 3 themes of social order and social control, to the analysis of the role of the media in generating moral panics and amplifying deviance, and to the methodological evaluation of crime data that underpins the whole topic. Labelling theory also functions across the paper as a recurrent evaluative tool against functionalist, Marxist and realist explanations.
Howard S. Becker (1963), in Outsiders, is the most influential labelling theorist. His central claim is that deviance is not an inherent quality of an act but the product of social definition:
"Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender'." — Becker (1963)
Rules, Becker argued, do not exist naturally; they are created by moral entrepreneurs — individuals and groups who campaign to have their moral vision enshrined in law. The making of a new rule simultaneously creates a new category of "outsider". Becker analysed the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act (1937) in the United States, showing how a moral crusade — associated with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry Anslinger — succeeded in criminalising cannabis use and thereby created a new class of criminal where none had previously existed. The point is general: deviance expands or contracts not because behaviour changes but because the rules and their enforcement change.
Once an act is labelled deviant, the label itself has consequences. Becker argued that a deviant label can become a master status: it eclipses all the person's other identities (worker, parent, neighbour) so that they are responded to first and foremost as "a criminal", "an addict", "a delinquent". This altered treatment can launch a deviant career and a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the person comes to live up to the label. The career may run as follows:
graph TD
A["Initial (primary) deviant act"] --> B["Detection and public labelling (arrest, charge, conviction)"]
B --> C["Label becomes a master status"]
C --> D["Social exclusion: loss of job, friends, conventional opportunities"]
D --> E["Pushed toward others who share the label"]
E --> F["Entry into a deviant subculture; identity confirmed"]
F --> G["Further (secondary) deviance"]
Becker's analysis has deep roots in the symbolic interactionism of G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley, for whom the self is not given but emerges through interaction: we come to see ourselves as others see us (Cooley's "looking-glass self"). Applied to deviance, this means that a label, once applied and accepted, can reshape the self-concept and hence future conduct — the mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Becker also drew a useful distinction between the rule-creators (the moral entrepreneurs who campaign for new laws) and the rule-enforcers (police, officials) who apply them; enforcers, he noted, have their own institutional interests and discretion, so that enforcement is selective and the same act may or may not result in a label depending on who commits it and how the enforcer reacts. A further implication is methodological: because deviance is the outcome of this process of definition and reaction, the sociologist cannot study "deviants" as a pre-given category but must study the process by which the label is created, applied and resisted. This is why interactionists favour qualitative methods — participant observation and unstructured interviews — that can access the meanings of those involved.
Edwin Lemert (1951) drew the foundational distinction on which labelling theory rests:
| Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Primary deviance | Deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled. Most people commit occasional primary deviance (speeding, fare-dodging, minor theft) without being caught, and it has little effect on their self-concept or social identity. The causes of primary deviance are, Lemert argued, so diverse as to be of little theoretical interest. | A person shoplifts once, is not caught, and does not think of themselves as a criminal. |
| Secondary deviance | Deviance that flows from the societal reaction to an act — from being publicly caught, labelled and treated as deviant. The label becomes a master status, the person internalises a deviant identity, and further deviance follows as a consequence of the labelling process itself. | The same person is caught, prosecuted and publicly labelled a "thief"; stigmatised and excluded, they come to see themselves as criminal and offend further. |
Lemert's decisive insight is that the societal reaction can cause more deviance than it prevents: the response to deviance may be more significant, sociologically, than the original act. Lemert illustrated the point through a study of stuttering among the Pacific North-West coastal peoples, arguing that an intense cultural emphasis on oratory created the very anxiety that produced the speech defect — a paradigm of how the reaction to an imperfection can amplify it. Transposed to crime, the implication is radical: by detecting, prosecuting, publicly shaming and excluding the offender, the criminal justice system may set in train precisely the exclusion, blocked legitimate opportunity and identity-transformation that propel the person into a deviant career. The "cure" can become a cause. This is the theoretical basis for the claim that the criminal justice system can amplify rather than reduce crime, and for the policy conclusion — developed by Becker and later by Braithwaite — that diversion and reintegration may achieve more than stigmatising punishment.
Key Definition: Secondary deviance is deviance that arises as a result of the societal reaction to primary deviance: the individual accepts the deviant label, incorporates it into their identity, and engages in further deviant behaviour as a consequence.
Aaron Cicourel (1968), in The Social Organisation of Juvenile Justice, studied the working practices of probation and police officers in California. He found that the decision to arrest, charge and prosecute rested on officers' typifications — common-sense stereotypes of what a "typical delinquent" looks like. Young people who fitted the typification (working-class, from "broken homes", from disadvantaged or ethnic-minority backgrounds) were far more likely to be arrested and processed, while middle-class youth who had committed similar acts were more often released with a warning because their families could successfully present them as essentially "good" children who had merely made a mistake — they could negotiate justice more effectively.
Cicourel's conclusion is methodologically radical: official crime statistics do not measure the real distribution of crime; they measure the activities and assumptions of the agencies that produce them. Justice is negotiated rather than applied uniformly, and the apparent concentration of crime among the lower class and ethnic minorities may be, in part, an artefact of how that crime is policed and recorded.
Cicourel's argument has far-reaching consequences for the whole sociology of crime, because so many theories — functionalist, subcultural and traditional Marxist alike — rest their accounts of the distribution of crime on official statistics. If those statistics are the product of a series of discretionary decisions (by victims who decide whether to report, by police who decide whether to record and arrest, by prosecutors who decide whether to charge, and by courts who decide whether to convict), then they index the operation of the criminal justice funnel rather than the volume and distribution of "real" crime. Every stage of this funnel introduces selection and bias. The interactionist therefore treats the statistics not as a resource (a more-or-less accurate measure to be explained) but as a topic in their own right — something to be investigated as a social construction. This is a classic theory–methods link: the same official statistics that a positivist such as Durkheim treats as hard social facts are, for the interactionist, the contingent outcome of meaning-laden decisions. The point also helps explain the value of victim surveys and self-report studies, which attempt to capture crime that never enters the official count — the so-called "dark figure" of unrecorded crime — and which consistently suggest that offending is more widespread, and more evenly distributed across social groups, than the official statistics imply.
Jock Young (1971) studied cannabis use among "hippies" in Notting Hill, London. Initially, drug use was peripheral to the group's lifestyle — a minor leisure activity (primary deviance). Intensified policing, however, triggered a deviance amplification spiral: as raids increased, the hippies felt persecuted, withdrew into a more closed and defiant community, and drug use moved to the centre of the group's identity as a badge of resistance. Media coverage amplified public concern, which justified yet more policing — closing the loop. Young's study is the classic empirical demonstration that control can produce the very deviance it targets. (Young later became a leading left realist, and came to argue that labelling theory, including this earlier work, neglected the real harm of crime — see Evaluation.)
Key Definition: A deviance amplification spiral is a process in which the societal reaction to deviance (policing, media coverage and public concern) increases rather than reduces the deviance it was intended to control.
Stanley Cohen (1972), in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, developed the concept of the moral panic through a study of the Mods and Rockers disturbances at English seaside resorts in the 1960s. Cohen showed how the media exaggerated and distorted relatively minor incidents of youth disorder, manufacturing folk devils — simplified, stereotyped and demonised groups onto which public anxiety could be projected. The media contribution to a moral panic typically involves:
The reaction — heightened policing, harsher sentencing, public hostility — could then drive a deviance amplification spiral, marginalising the labelled youth and confirming their oppositional identity. Cohen's model remains the template for analysing successive panics about youth, drugs, "mugging" and online harms.
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