TY - JOUR AU - Davis, Phillip PY - 2010/04/26 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - DEVIANT BEHAVIOR JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/deviant-behavior SP - AB - Welcome! I look forward to teaching this course, and I hope you enjoy taking it. I think it is important to note right away that calling something "deviant" only sounds like it is the sociologist who is making judgments about right and wrong. In fact, sociologists study the negative reactions of others, whether or not they personally agree with those judgments. Researchers also study the social control that groups and institutions exert over others. That control is by nature selective, so sociologists pay a lot of attention to the ways that stigma and labeling weigh more heavily on people with less power. Most of the research focuses on things like mental illness, violent crime, gangs, drug and alcohol abuse, "cults," and suicide. We will certainly examine those topics in this class, but we also will study the deviance of corporations, professionals, and government officials. In examining those and other types of elite deviance, we will explore how social control weighs less heavily "at the top" where people have more power. We will constantly pay attention to the question, "By whose rules, and by what standards, is something said to be deviant?" And, "Who benefits from the labeling of some things as deviant and not others?" ER -