SOCI 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Social Issue, Puritans, Kai T. Erikson
27 Feb 2018
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Functions of crime: 4 ways in which deviance contributes to the normative order, it sets boundaries, it enhances group solidarity, it maintains innovative functions, it reduces tensions. Tautology: circular reasoning, because it exists it must be functional, if it were not functional, it would not exist, prostitution (davis) would not exist if it were not functional, crime, poverty, repressive, governments, deviance, etc. You will never a society of saints, there is something about the inherit quality of society that makes deviance functional and beneficial to society. Physiological: davis noted that females do not have periods of anoestrus (complete unresponsiveness to sexual stimuli). Different from other mammals because it was conditioned (sexual stimuli) Conclusion: functionalism is a problematic theory for the explanation of crime and deviance, nevertheless, it persists in many difference guises since its intellectual dominace in the 1930, 40 and 50.
