SOC 1001 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Altruistic Suicide, Social Control, Social Integration
Week 5 Book Notes
Ch. 6- Social Control and Deviance
▪ What is Social Deviance?
o Social deviance: any transgression of socially established norms, formal vs. informal
▪ Crime: formal deviance, the violation of laws enacted by society
o Because social norms and rules are fluid and subject to change, the definitions of what
cunts as deviance are likely to vary across contexts
▪ Functionalist Approaches to Deviance and Social Control
o Emile Durkheim- social cohesion: social bonds; how well people relate to each other and
get along on a day-to day basis
▪ Mechanical/segmental solidarity: social cohesion based on sameness
▪ Organic solidarity: social cohesion based on difference and interdependence of
the parts
▪ The way in which social realignment is achieved depends on the type of
solidarity holding that particular society together
• Premodern societies, where people are united by sameness, tend to be
characterized by punitive justice: making the offender suffer
• Organic solidarity produces social sanctions that focus on the individual;
they are tailored to the specific conditions and circumstances of the
perpetrator
o Collective conscience: a set of common assumptions about how the world works
o Social control: mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals
▪ Formal social sanctions: mechanisms of social control by which rules or laws
prohibit deviant criminal behavior
▪ Informal social sanctions: the usually unexpressed but widely known rules of
group membership; the unspoken rules of social life
o Social integration: how well you are integrated into your social group or community
o Social regulation: the number of rules guiding your daily life and, more specifically, what
you can reasonably expect from the world on a day-to-day basis
o Anomie: a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably
expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness
o Durkheim's hypothesis- the social norms of particular groups-the conditions of group
life- generate variations in group suicide rates
▪ Egoistic suicide: suicide that occurs when one is not well integrated into a social
group
▪ Altruistic suicide: suicide that occurs when one experiences too much social
integration
▪ Anomic suicide: suicide that occurs as a result of insufficient social regulation
▪ Fatalistic suicide: suicide that occurs as a result of too much social regulation
o Strain theory: Robert Merton's theory that deviance occurs when a society does not give
all of its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals
▪ Conformist: individual who accepts both the goals and strategies to achieve
them that are considered socially acceptable
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