Debating the Death of Deviance Transgressing Extremes in Conspiracy Narratives

Abstract

In recent years the sociology of deviance has been marked by an ongoing, lively and emergent intellectual debate. The parameters of the competing arguments are both conceptual (Best, 2004a, 2004b, 2006; Goode, 2006) and ideological (Hendershott, 2002; Sumner, 1994), reflecting shifting contemporary theoretical concerns (Adler and Adler, 2006; Dotter, 2002). Questions regarding the intellectual coherence of the field (Goode, 2004a), its present-day relevance (Goode, 2004b) and even of its “death” (Goode, 2002, 2003, 2004a; Sumner, 1994) have been taken up by scholars, creating a terrain no less fertile than that represented by the growth of interactionist theories in the 1960s and 1970s (Becker, 1973 [1963], 1964, 1967).