ABSTRACT

In ‘Humanizing the Deviant’ (article no. 18), Muncie and Fitzgerald chart the emergence of a ‘radical’ approach to deviancy theory in terms of the shift from the study of deviant behaviour to the ‘posing of definitional and structural questions’. This movement away from the liberal-pluralist positions which characterized ‘mainstream’ criminology in the 1940s and 1950s was a gradual process, achieved by a series of internal modifications to the theory rather than by a single sharp break. Initially, deviancy theory offered only an implicit critique of ‘consensus’ theories of the social order by focusing on the plural worlds of the deviant, the relativity of social rules, and the meaningful rather than the ‘pathological’ nature of the deviant act. However, it became clear that social theorists of deviance would also have to explain the dominant character of the rules from which the deviant ‘deviated’. ‘Becoming deviant’ had to include an account of the institutional arrangements by which deviance was defined, labelled and processed.