SOC 2070 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Mother Teresa, Saka, Paradigm Shift

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 2070
• Professor: Linda Hunter

Document Summary

I. deviance and boundary maintenance for communities: communities are boundary maintaining. Every community occupies a specific space in the world, which marks it as a special place. A community maintains boundaries as its members tend to confine and limit themselves to a certain range of conduct and behavior. Human communities maintain boundaries for the following reasons: *to retain a given pattern of consistent activity and behavior. *to retain cultural integrity: marking and publicizing boundaries. The networks of social interaction and relationships between members. The person labeled as deviant is one whose activities have moved outside the margins of the group. The most critical for publicizing boundaries are those which take place between deviant persons and official agents of the community, including. Erikson states that newspapers and radio and television (and internet) offer much the same kind of entertainment as public hangings. Communities promote deviance: boundaries are not fixed and constant. Over time there are changes in group structure and leadership.