ABSTRACT
The constructionist approach to deviance argues that the sociologist needs to establish how audiences conceptualize, define, and react to what they consider wrongdoing. Societies as a whole, and social collectivities within them, construct deviance in three stages. First: They create categories of the behavior, beliefs, characteristics, and persons they evaluate. The second step in socially constructing deviance is that observers—audiences—put a good or bad spin on what they’ve created categories for. Are the phenomena in these categories they’ve created acceptable or unacceptable? Normative or non-normative? Are they regarded as deviant—or conventional? Thirdly, audiences react to normative violations. The punishment of the offender is likely to vary from one audience to another, one society to another. In contrast to explanatory theories of deviance, which takes social constructions for granted, constructionism asks why collectivities make rules in the first place—and who makes them. Why do certain collectivities make certain kinds of rules? Are agents of social control—the society at large, members of some groups, or the police—more likely to apprehend and punish members of certain social categories of enactors of wrongdoing?
