“Deviance” Is for Undergrads, “Social Control” Is for Grad Students

Abstract

Something odd is happening: an argument against abstract pronouncements on the presence of deviance has spawned abstract pronouncements on the death of deviance. The insight that deviance is not an objective category, but rather a locally negotiated definition of the situation, was, as so often happens, first taken too far to have consequences arguments of this sort cannot have. Then, the insight was forgotten the moment these arguments were made, and all the abstract stances eschewed for the local definitions of the situation returned to create an abstract scientific definition of the situation: the “death of deviance”.