SOC 201 Chapter 11: Chapter 11.27
Document Summary
In the case of a take-home examination, it clearly means that a student should not copy another student"s answer. When some students go too far and exceed the academic community"s boundaries or tolerance limits, the community reacts, and that reaction defines specific situational meanings of the rule. Durkheim noted that deviant people are sources of social change of the sort that can benefit society. As proved by the american revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, today"s deviance may become tomorrow"s morality, today"s deviant may become tomorrow"s hero. Sociologists who study crime and deviance use data from a variety of sources. It"s important to be careful when interpreting these data. Suppose, for example, you came across table 11. 2 . This table shows, among other things, that in the year 2000 more than half (57. 9 percent) of all people in state prisons for drug offenses were black.
