ABSTRACT
The major contribution to the study of the social typing process itself comes from the interactionist or transactional approach to deviance. This chapter focuses on how society labels rule-breakers as belonging to certain deviant groups and how, once the person is thus type cast, his acts are interpreted in terms of the status to which he has been assigned. It also focuses on one especially important carrier and producer of moral panics, namely, the mass media. The chapter utilizes a detailed case study of the Mods and Rockers phenomenon to illustrate some of the more intrinsic features in the emergence of such collective episodes of juvenile deviance and the moral panics they both generate and rely upon for their growth. It is precisely because the Mods and Rockers phenomenon was both a generalized type of deviance and also manifested itself as a series of discrete events, that both models are relevant.
