People do not become criminals because of their social background, crime emerges because of labelling by authorities. Crime is the product of interactions between certain individuals and the police, rather than social background.
There is no such thing as an inherently deviance act
Howard Becker (1963) “Deviancy is not a quality of the act a person commits, but rather a consequences of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’.”
Becker – The Outsiders – Malinowski – Incest example
Applies to drugs – compare illegal ‘legal’ highs UK to legal weed in Colorado
Not everyone who is deviant gets labelled as such
Whether an actor is labelled as deviant depends on: their interactions with the police, their background/ appearance, the circumstances of the offence.
negative labels (deviant/ criminal) are generally given to the powerless by the powerful.
Cicourel – first stage – working class kids more likely to be labelled as deviant by police; second stage – more likely to be prosecuted by courts, most of this is based on appearance and language, not the deviant act.
Labelling has real consequences – it can lead to deviancy amplification, the self-fulfilling prophecy and deviant careers
Lemert – primary and secondary deviance
Becker – labelling, the deviant career and the master status
Labelling theory applied to education – the self-fulfilling prophecy
Moral panics, folk devils and deviancy amplification
Labelling theory should promote policies that prevent labelling minor acts as deviant
Decriminalisation (of drugs for example)
Reintegrative shaming to label the act, not the criminal.
Evaluations
Positive
Negative
Labelling theory emphasises the following:
– That the law is not ‘set in stone’ – it is actively constructed and changes over time
– That law enforcement is often discriminatory
– That we cannot trust crime statistics
– That attempts to control crime can backfire and may make the situation worse
– That agents of social control may actually be one of the major causes of crime, so we should think twice about giving them more power.
– It tends to be determinstic, not everyone accepts their labels
– It assumes offenders are just passive – it doesn’t recognise the role of personal choice in committing crime
– It gives the offender a ‘victim status’ – Realists argue that this perspective actually ignores the actual victims of crime.
– It tends to emphasise the negativesides of labelling rather than the positive side
– It fails to explain why acts of primary deviance exist, focussing mainly on secondary deviance.
– Structural sociologists argue that there are deeper, structural explanations of crime, it isn’t all just a product of labelling and interactions.
Functionalists believe society shapes the individual and that social order and value consensus are good.
Functionalism is a structural consensus theory. Functionalists believe there is a social structure made up of institutions which shape individual behaviour. Institutions such as the family and education socialise individuals and create value consensus.
This post covers the following:
Definitions of the key Functionalist concept: structural and consensus
A summary of the key ideas of Emile Durkheim: social facts, social solidarity, and anomie
A summary of the key ideas of Taloctt Parsons: the organic analogy, the importance of socialisation, value consensus and functional prerequisites.
Evaluations of Functionalism including criticisms and ways in which it may be relevant in contemporary society.
This post has primarily been written as an introduction to Functionalism for AS and A level sociology students.
Functionalism is a ‘structural-consensus theory’
The ‘structural bit’ means that Functionalists argue there is a social structure that shapes individual behaviour through the process of socialisation.
The ‘consensus bit’ means that Functionalists believe that a successful society is based on ‘value consensus’ – people agree around a set of shared norms and values. This value consensus enables people to co-operate and to work together to achieve shared goals.
Functionalists also believe that a successful society has a stable social structure, in which different institutions perform unique functions that contribute to the maintenance of the whole – in the same way that the different organs of the body perform different functions to keep a human being healthy.
In a successful or ‘healthy’ society, for example, social life is organised so that the family socialises the young and meets emotional needs, school teaches us broader life skills, and the workplace is where we contribute to the economy.
Functionalists generally believe institutions perform positive functions (they do good things for the individual and society), and social institutions work together to provide social order and prevent too much crime and deviance.
This post provides an introduction to some of the key ideas of Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, two key functionalist thinkers and some overall evaluations of the Functionalist Perspective.
Durkheim’s Functionalism
Historical Context
Emile Durkheim (1858 – 1917) was the first ever professor of Sociology.
Durkheim’s major works were published between 1893 and 1912 –and his writings are mainly concerned with how rapid and dramatic social changes such as industrialisation at that time would affect French society. . Below are just two of Durkheim’s key ideas
Society shapes the Individual
Durkheim argued that society has a reality of its own over and above the individuals who comprise it. Members of society are constrained by ‘social facts’, by ‘ways of acting, thinking and feeling which are external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him’.
Social facts include such things as beliefs, moral codes, and basic norms and values which are passed from one generation to the next and shared by individuals who make up a society. It is not the consciousness of the individual that directs human behaviour but common beliefs and sentiments which shape his or her consciousness. In short, according to Durkheim, society shapes the individual.
Social solidarity, socialisation and anomie
Durkheim believed that too much freedom was bad for the individual – when individuals have too freedom, or when there is no clear guidance about what is right and wrong, individuals suffer from a sense uncertainty and confusion about their place in world, not knowing what they should be doing, a condition Durkheim called ‘anomie’.
Durkheim argued that societies needed to create a sense of social solidarity – which is making individuals feel as if they part of something bigger and teaching them the standards of acceptable behaviour. At one level this is achieved through the family, but for Durkheim, feeling a sense of belonging to wider society was also important. Traditionally this was achieved through religion, but Durkheim was concerned that religion was fading in 20th century Europe, and that modern societies faced a ‘crisis of anomie’.
He theorised that new institutions such as schools, work places and voluntary organisations would eventually provide the ‘social glue’ which would make people feel like they belonged. Durkheim’s thinking is actually one of the fundamental things which convinced governments in Europe to create national education systems in order to socialise the young and create a sense of solidarity.
For Durkheim, and functionalists in general, socialisation (the teaching of shared norms and values) through institutions was one of the key ways in which social solidarity was to be achieved.
Talcott Parson’s Functionalism
Writing in the 1940s and 1950s Talcott Parsons built on Durkheim’s work
The Organic Analogy – we should see society as a system
Talcott Parsons saw society as working like a human body, arguing that institutions in society were like organs in the body – each performing specific functions which were necessary to the maintenance of the whole. Parsons argued that parts of society should be understood in terms of what they contribute to the maintenance of the whole.
Parsons identified various similarities between the human body and a society:
The body
Institutions
Each Organ has a unique function
Institutions have a unique function
All the bits essentially work together harmoniously
All institutions work together harmoniously
Organs are interdependent
Organs are interdependent
Has an identifiable boundary
Has an identifiable boundary
The sum is greater than its parts
The sum is greater than its parts.
Normal: healthy
Normal: low rates social problems.
Parsons believed that societies had certain ‘functional prerequisites‘ which need to be met in order for society to survive. Just like human beings need certain things to survive, so every society has to have certain things in order to function properly. For example, a society must produce and distribute resources such as food and shelter; there has to be some kind of organization that resolves conflicts, and others that socialize the young.
According to Parsons a social system has four needs which must be met for continued survival – These are adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency. In advanced industrial society, these needs are met through specialized sub systems:
Every society needs to
Institutions in society which might perform these functions?
Produce goods and services
the work place
Achieve ‘value consensus’ – by teaching people the difference between right and wrong
schools
Resolve differences of opinion, deal with conflict, and punish ‘deviants’.
courts
Reproduce and socialize the next generation so society can carry on
the family
Value Consensus
Parsons believed that American society generally worked for most people, and thus preserving the social order (preventing conflict or revolution) was particularly important.
Parsons argued that social order was mainly achieved not through the rule of force, but through institutions promoting Value Consensus – which is agreement around shared values. Parsons argued that commitment to common values is the basis for order in society.
Two of the most important institutions which do this are the nuclear family and school
The Family is responsible for providing ‘primary socialisation’ – teaching the basic norms and values of our society. Parsons believed the nuclear family was the best type of family for providing a stable upbringing for children, and the best type of family to provide moral guidance (the difference between right and wrong.
Later on in life, education integrates individuals into wider society – providing individuals with a sense of belonging and identity to the wider society. Parsons argued, for example, that education does this through teaching us a shared history and language.
Two of the most important shared values in industrial societies include a belief in the work ethic and a belief in meritocracy (the idea that people are rewarded on the basis of their ability and effort), both of which are taught through education. Parsons argued these were both vital to modern society because a work ethic ensures people value working rather than lazing about and meritocracy means that those people who end up in lower paid jobs accept inequality in society because they believe they at least had a fair chance to do better in life.
This relates back to the previous point – individuals need to be integrated in shared values in order to be directed to meet the system’s needs. For Parsons the system has two mechanisms for ensuring that individuals conform to shared norms and meet the system’s needs: socialization and social control.
Evaluating Functionalism
When evaluating Functionalism we need to keep in mind that it is a historical perspective: Durkheim’s work is over a century old and Parsons was writing in the 1940s and 1950s, so it is quite likely that some of the key ideas aren’t that useful in helping us to understand modern society.
Criticisms of Functionalism
The easiest way to criticise Functionalism is to use some of the other sociological perspectives, and some of the points below do that.
It is difficult to argue today that there is value consensus in society – societies around the world seem much more divided. Brexit in Britain, for example, divided the nation in half, and America is split into anti- Trump and pro-Trump supporters, and divided by strong attitudes on abortion.
Marxists believe Functionalism is biased and ideological – Functionalists such as Parsons said that Value Consensus was necessary because they wanted to preserve the social order, whereas in reality society is based on inequality and exploitation and it is in the interests of the exploited to join together in revolution.
Interactionists and argue that individuals are less constrained by the social structure than functionalists suggest – individuals have more freedom to shape their own lives and are less predictable than Functionalists suggest.
Postmodernists argue that there is no such thing as a social structure or social norms, rather ‘society’ (if there is such a thing) is fluid and diverse.
Ways in which Functionalism may still be useful for understanding contemporary society
While some of the key ideas of Functionalism may not seem to ‘fit in’ with society today, some concepts do seem to be relevant…
Durkheim’s idea of ‘anomie’ for example may be more relevant than ever before – it seems fair to say that society is more disordered and chaotic than ever – and the amount of people suffering with mental health disorders is higher than ever – and maybe the level of uncertainty has got something to do with this…?
While it is fair to say that on an individual level people are unpredictable, when we look at things from a macro perspective, societies appear more predictable (if not entirely predictable) – there are clear statistical patterns which emerge by social class, gender and and ethnicity, a main theme of A-level sociology – for example, in general, children from poorer households as a whole do worse in education that children from richer households.
Functionalism: Discussion Questions
Think about the following questions – try to think of further contemporary evidence for and against each question which both supports and criticises these key ideas of functionalism
To what extent does socialisation shape an individual’s identity?
Is anomie (too much freedom) a problem in today’s society?
Do institutions really perform positive functions? (do we all benefit the same amount or do some benefit more than others?)
Do we have value consensus in today’s society?
Functionalism: Find out More
The Functionalist perspective is a recurring theme in the first and second years of A level sociology, and if you will find many of the above ideas expressed in more detail, and applied more specifically in the following posts:
A summary of Michel Foucault’s work on identity, deviance and normality, governmentality, subjectification and technologies of the self, taken from Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ (2014) – also includes Nikolas Rose’s development of Foucault’s work.
If there’s one central idea in this chapter (IMO) it’s this – ‘In today’s society, we have little choice but to be tied into a project of the self in which the self becomes something to be worked on – and it is in this way that power works through us.’
Becoming ourselves: governing and/ through identities
In the contemporary West it is hard to avoid the idea that the self is a project to be worked on. We see this everywhere, but especially in self-help books, therapy, the various experts promising to guide us through different stages of our lives and, of course, in the media: in chat-shows and ‘make-over’ programmes for example.
All of this is presented as freeing, as if working on the self involves freeing us of the oppressive influences of others.
What Nikolas Rose calls the ‘norm of autonomy’ has become an orthodoxy in many discussions about identity – but we should consider the argument that when we are incited to be ‘free’, we are then the most enmeshed in in the workings of power – the relationship of the self to itself within a contemporary project of self-actualisation, self-awareness and self-improvement has become a norm which ties us to relentless self-scrutiny, in which we watch ourselves for signs of deviancy and wrong doing.
We can only perceive such a project of the self as being about autonomy if we perceive power as a repressive and denying force.
An alternative perspective, associated with Michel Foucault, envisages power as a force which works positively through our desires and our selves, which sees categories of subject as produced through forms of knowledge.
(A legitimate question to ask would be why are we so obsessed with the idea of individual autonomy when we live such complex, interdependent lives.)
Power/ knowledge
Michel Foucault – ‘Power Produces Truths’
The Enlightenment view = ‘knowledge is power’ – if we obtain knowledge this will free us from the workings of power. This assumes a true self which lies outside or beyond power and self-knowledge, realised through reason.
Foucault – opposes the view that knowledge is power – one of the ways in which power works is through producing ‘truths’ about the world. These truths come to seem obvious, necessary and self-evident, they form part of the coherence of the social world and place the self within it.
Foucault argues that there has been a gradual shift in the uses and forms of power in the last 150 years in the West –
From juridical, or law-like power – which uses the language of rights and obligations.
To forms of normalising, or regulatory power – which uses the language of health, normality and self-fulfilment.
Juridical power says ‘obey me or you will be punished’, regulatory power says ‘obey me so that you can be happy’. This is a form of power which doesn’t rely on coercion, but one in which we scrutinise and regulate ourselves, the self comes to act on itself.
For Foucault, power is at its most powerful when it is its least repressive – power works not just though denying but through offering ways of being and pleasure.
As Tom Inglis puts it – ‘power announces truth’ – its truths are forged on the basis of knowledge, but this refers not to knowledge about a set of facts but rather to what might be termed ways of knowing, or in Foucauldian terms discourse.
Discourses define what can be said and thought, and how these things can be said and thought. – they are verbal or non-verbal ways of organising the world, creating ways of conceptualising that are seen as axiomatically obvious – they are epistemological enforcers (Said, 1991). (I guess they’re sort of like paradigms!)
An example of a discourse today is to understand present emotional problems as stemming from a troubled childhood, rather than because you’ve been cursed by a witch-doctor – the later would just not be taken seriously, it is outside of the discourse of understanding negative emotions.
Discourse differs to the concept of ideology because ideology presupposes a real which is beyond ideology which the ideology obscures – to speak of discourses is to speak of the knowledges which produce the truth. Foucault, in fact talks of the politics of truth.
What this line of questioning opens up is the possibility that who we and who other people are is an effect of what we know ourselves and others to be, that it is discourses which have produced categories of person and that this is how we understand ourselves.
Making people up
A good example of how categories of people are produced can be found in the way many Westerners think about sexuality – many people don’t just think of sex as something they do, they think of sex as something they are.
Foucault argues that this way of brining together sexuality and identity is relatively recent. In the 19th century, same-sex relations occurred, but there was no special consideration given to ‘being homosexual’.
It was throughout the 20th century, along with the new pseudo-science of Sexology in which people categorised the minutiae of sexual activity, that the category of the homosexual became created as a subject, and thus the identity of the homosexual was produced (or you might say, invented/ constructed). Alongside this, the category of heterosexual also needed to be produced, because homosexuality has no meaning without it.
These new categories of knowledge in fact produced what they aimed to describe – categories of person.
Foucault wants to challenge the ‘sexual liberation’ discourse – especially the idea that new apparent sexual freedoms bring with them an absence of power and control. With increased interest in sexuality in the 20th century came new forms of scrutiny as more experts emerged – and while the invention of sexual subjects has clearly been liberating for some, it has also become a means whereby we increasingly scrutinise ourselves for signs of abnormality and unhealthiness.
This legacy goes beyond sexual identity to extend into every area of our lives and our identities.
Technologies of the self
One way in which power works is through categorising people in terms through which they come to understand themselves – in this sense subjectivities are created in regimes of knowledge and power.
In explaining the relationship of the self to itself, Foucault uses the term subjectification. There are two meanings of the word subject – subject to someone else through control and dependence and tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to, according to Foucault.
Through subjectification, people become tied to specific identities, they become subjects, but they also become subject-ed to the rules and norms engendered by a set of knowledges about these identities.
We have little choice but to be tied into a project of the self in which the self becomes something to be worked on – and it is in this way that power works through us.
We are subjected subjects across many forms of identity – parent, worker, citizen, for example, all of which demand a level of scrutiny to maintain. The way government works today is through establishing normal-abnormal categories along these various dimensions of identity and then people employ technologies of the self in order to stay within the boundaries of normality (usually) – (the struggle is to keep up, or stay ahead, if you like!)
Psy knowledge, expertise and authority
Psy knowledges includes such disciplines as medicine, psychiatry, psychology and pedagogy, which produce ‘truths’ about the self and its relation to others. These have gained ascendancy in the West, especially since these knowledges have escaped the boundaries of academia and inform a whole of host of professional practices (social work and teaching for example) and our daily lives through such things as chat-shows and gossip magazines.
Nikolas Rose argues that it is hard to conceive of person-hood today without reference to ‘psy.’
Psy governs through using regulatory or normalising power – not working in spite of our desires, but through them – and generating specific kinds of desire in the first place.
This process started about 150 years ago through the development of ‘technologies of responsibilisation’ – when the home became perceived as the counterweight to the state, new experts in the fields of medicine and education emerged to regulate private life – and these experts govern through making assertions about the way we should act as subjects, which go largely unquestioned.
Over the years subjects have come to understand themselves as people who should be morally responsible for their own actions by monitoring the minutiae of daily-life – two examples of how this is achieved in the context of education are the teaching of English literature in schools and more recently circle time – both of which encourage the development of a self-reflecting, moral, responsibilised subject.
The norm of autonomy and the scrutiny of the soul
Rose argues that we now live in a psychotherapeutic society in which the self is understood as an inner state, to be sought out, understood, and actualised. This doesn’t so much manifest itself as narcissism, but is rather something we are stuck with – most of us can’t imagine attempting to understand ourselves without the discourses of psy.
Therapy has now become the norm for many areas of social life – that is reflecting on inner states is seen to be a cure for all sorts of social ills. Rose’s task is show how this therapeutic culture which stresses autonomy actually ties us more closely to the workings of power.
Foucault suggested that abnormal and normal manifestations of sex became axes around which people’s behaviour could be judged – Rose has broadened this out – now it is not normality which is the goal, but rather autonomy, and he applies this to much more than the sexual dimension of identities.
We live in an era where dependency now means pathology – but the path to autonomy means adhering to the strictures of psy expertise and watching and monitoring ourselves more closely.
Rose argues that there are four principle sets of concern around the goal of autonomy:
A subjectification of work – work is understood as significant in terms of identity
A pyschologisation of the mundane – life events such as marriages and births are seen as having a potentially transformative role in life.
A therapeutics of fininitude – chapters in our life ending are now seen as times of potential danger but also possibility for personal growth.
A neurotisation of social intercourse – social ills have come to be understood in terms of problems stemming from the ways we interact with others.
Across these four dimensions, we see the production of a particular kind of self – ideally autonomous, self-actualising, exercising choice, and a project to be worked on.
For Rose, in a therapeutised culture, social ills become personal problems to be worked on. We are not necessarily free, because we are now obliged to live our lives as projects.
The state of the therapeutic
States still exercise regulatory, normalising power through the deployment of expertise. This is most notable in expert knowledge surrounding the child.
The state takes a special interest in producing the right kind of citizen – citizens who believe themselves to be free and who believe there are equal opportunities. This is primarily done through exploiting the desire of parents to be ‘good parents’, especially mothers. For example:
– parents are enjoined to turn learning into play
– they should evoke reason and rightness
– states employ numerous professionals which subject parenting to scrutiny
Parents are encouraged to engender a sense of autonomy in their children, but this autonomy is a myth – the belief that children can do anything will not reduce structural barriers to their achieving certain goals in life.
The state also retains its ability to use coercive measures, though these are rarely deployed, such as:
– parenting orders
– parenting contracts
– ASBOs
– Those who are subjected to these things fall into the category of ‘failed parent’ (or ‘failed human’) and if people are subject to these things, the failures are understood as their own or their parents’ fault, not because of social ills. The discourses of psy rest on these categories of exclusion.
Resisting these discourses is not straightforward – Foucault offers no straightforward method, other than to constantly question the desirability and legitimacy of such categories.
Evaluations of this perspective
The strength of this perspective lies in highlighting the myth of individual autonomy and the fact that your ‘identity’ isn’t really your own – you are a product of social categories, which in turn are products of power relations.
One problem is that this perspective cannot explain why people make such intense investments in their selves.
Lawler finishes the chapter by recommending Barry Smart’s ‘Michel Foucault’ (1985) and Michele Barret’s ‘The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault’ (1991) as good introductions to Foucault’s work.
A Summary of chapter three of Anthony Giddens’ Modernity and Self-Identity
Self-identity, history, modernity
Drawing on a therapeutic text – ‘Self-Therapy’ by Janette Rainwater – Giddens selects ten features which are distinctive about the search for self-identity in the late modern age:
The self is seen as a reflexive project for which the indivdual is responsible. Self-understanding is relegated to the more inclusive and fundamental aim of rebuilding a more rewarding sense of identity
The self forms a trajectory of development from the the past to the anticipated future. The lifespan rather than external events is in the foreground, the later are cast as either fortuitous or throwing up barriers which need to be overcome.
Reflexivity becomes continuous – the individual continuously asks the question ‘what am I doing in this moment, and what can I do to change?’ In this, reflexivity belongs to the reflexive historicity of modernity.
The narrative of the self is made explicit – in the keeping of an autobiography – which requires continual creative input.
Self-actualisation implies the control of time – essentially, the establishing of zones of time which have only remote connections with external temporal orders. Holding a dialogue with time is the very basis of self-realisation, and using the ever-present moment to direct one’s future life course is essential.
The reflexivity of the self extends to the body. Awareness of the body is central to the grasping of the moment. The point here is to establish a differentiated self, not to disolve the ego.
Self-actualisation is understood as a balance between opportunity and risk. The individual has to be prepared to take on greater levels of risk than is normal – to change is to risk things getting worse
The moral thread of self-atualisation is one of authenticity… Personal growth depends on conquering emotional blocks and tensions that prevent us from understanding ourself – recover or repeat old habits is the mantra
The life course is seen as a series of ‘passages’. All such transitions involve losss.
The line of development of the self is internally referential – it is the creation of a personal belief system by which someone changes – one’s first loyalty is to oneself.
The next question Giddens asks is how can we connect up these ten features of self-identity to the institutional transformations characteristic of the late-modern world? (Well, he is a sociologist, after all!)
Lifestyle and Life Plans
Therapy is a response to the backdrop to the existential terrain of late modern life which consists of the following features:
it is reflexively organised
it is permeated by abstract systems
the reordering of time and space has realigned the global and the local.
All of this has resulted in the primacy of lifestyle – A lifestyle may be defined as a more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces because they give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity. A lifestyle implies a plurality of choices – it is something which is adopted rather than handed down (and should not merely be conflated with consumerism in this instance).
(NB Giddens also says that we do not all have complete freedom of choice over our lifestyles – we are restricted by work, and by class etc… and moreover, the lifestyle pattern we choose limits what we can do if we wish to maintain an authentic narrative of the self.) (NBB – If you’re an A level sociology student, a recent podcast by the AQA criticises Giddens for not saying what I’ve he’s just said in this book that he wrote, thus that particular podcast is wrong.)
The plurality of choices which confronts the individual in this derives from several influences:
We live in a post-traditional order, the signposts offered by tradition are now blank.
We have a pluralisation of lifeworlds – the millieu to which we are exposed are much more diverse.
Experts do not agree, so there is no longer a certain source of knowledge.
The prevalance of mediated experiences – the collage effect of the media – we have new communities and shed loads of new possibilities
Life planning becomes essential in the above social context – life planning is an attempt to ‘colonise the future’ under conditions of social uncertainty – teenagers who ‘drift around’ today are increasingly going against the norm!
Two things in particular change in this context – (1) The Pure Relationship comes to be crucial to the reflexive project of the self and (2) the body becomes subject of ever greater levels of personal control – both become attempts by the individual to sustain a ‘narrative of the self‘.
Mary Berry’s recent comments against deep fat fryers and Jaffa cake dunking could be interpreted (using Bourdieu) as an example of the unconscious process through which the middle classes assert and maintain their superiority by defining working class practices as ‘bad taste’ and ‘unhealthy’.
Mary Berry – Inflicting ‘silent harms’ against the working class every time she bakes a cake?
Gregg Wallace picked up on this with his comments about Berry’s attack on fried food as an attack on the British way of life, in fact, from a Bourdieuean (if that’s even a word?) perspective this is only really an unconscious attack against a working class way of life, part of the usual day to day process through which the middle classes (such as Berry) assert their arbitrary tastes (the ones they grew up with) as ‘normal’ ‘healthy’ or just ‘right’ against working class dispositions which are simultaneously defined as ‘abnormal’ ‘unhealthy’ or just ‘wrong’.
Mary Berry is here demonstrating a sociological concept called ‘cultural capital‘ – a simplified definition of which is the skills and knowledges a group uses to define itself as superior and thus gain or maintain advantage (more status, power, wealth) in society’. A lot of sociological research has focused on how the middle classes are able to use their cultural capital to give their children and advantage in the education system, and simultaneously disadvantage working class children, but I think it applies quite nicely to the world of food, dining and health too.
As Steph Lawler (2014) says, in her excellent introductory text on the sociology of identity…
‘One of the ways class works is through marking identities as ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, pathological or healthy, normal or abnormal, and classed identities are part of the stakes in class politics – working class people don’t know the right things, they don’t value the right things, they don’t look right and they don’t act right, while the middle classes silently pass as normal.’
Class divisions and distinctions have not disappeared, class has not ceased to be a meaningful frame for analysis, instead it has become an absent presence – it circulates socially while being unnamed.
As Bourdieu has demonstrated ‘taste’ is now one of the primary means through which class is configured – that which is tasteful is seen as middle class, and vice-versa for ‘vulgar’ working class taste – the problem here is that there is nothing natural about taste – it is simply what the middle class say it is.
Expressions of disgust at working-class existence remain rife among middle class commentators and middle classness relies on the expulsion and exclusion of (what is held to be) working classness.
Where does this sense of disgust come from?
Bourdieu argued that the public bourgeoisie (mainly journalists and academics, and social commentators), those who are low in economic capital, but high in cultural capital, use their voices to express contempt for the working classes, and at the same time position their middle class selves against them.
So from this perspective, Berry herself must feel low in status compared to the ‘proper rich’, and makes up for this sense of status-frustration by defining her ‘good manners’ as superior.
This is ultimately all about power, about the broader practice of the middle classes trying to position themselves above the working classes by defining them as inferior along the axis of taste.
However, the fact that all of this is social in origin, and the fact that power is operating here is obscured, because
part of this process of constructing middle-classness (converting cultural capital into symbolic capital) involves using knowledge itself
because the cultural capital is marked as ‘normal’ the fact that it is classed at all is obscured.
the competencies and knowledges associated with the middle class are not generally seen as social mechanisms because they are believed to be part of the self, and thus class is not seen as an objective position but it becomes configured into ‘who we are’.
Mary Berry and Individualisation (?)
Another process which Berry is engaged in is that of individualisation – the cultural capital dimension of class is social in origin and circulation, but part of that circulation involves sending out the message that these tastes are all down to the individual – thus if someone has ‘superior’ ‘middle class’ tastes they believe they have chosen this, and vice versa for those with vulgar working-class tastes – they are invited by the middle classes to feel a sense of shame about this and to blame themselves for their own inferiority.
NOW do you think Mary Berry is such a sweet lady? – From this Bourdeuian perspective, in reality she’s the evil arbitrator of cultural capital, inflicting the hidden damages of class on deep-frying, jaffa-cake dunking working class people all over the country, well, mostly up north.
If this all sounds like it’s making a mountain out of a mole-hill, that’s precisely the point of the post because what doesn’t seem like a big deal really is… this is precisely how class divisions are perpetuated in contemporary society…
‘What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect’ (Skeggs, 2004, 118, again taken from Lawler).
On this final point, Sennet and Cobb (1977) famously observed that class inflicts hidden injuries – in terms of the ridicule, shaming, silence and self-scrutiny which go along with a position of pathology.
I thus felt it my professional duty to point Gregg Wallace in the direction of Bourdieu in order to help him defend our working class position against such subtle injuries.
There’s nothing wrong with eating fried food, dunking biscuits, or anything else which may not be middle class, but if one lets such things pass in silence, such practices have a tendency to being internalised as wrong and thus silently annihilated.
And P.S. It’s official – Gregg Wallace loves Sociology.
NB – I’m not suggesting that this type of analysis is in any way correct, it’s merely an example of how you might interpret recent events using a Bourdieuean (is that a word?) framework.
Related Posts
Cultural Capital (focusing on its application to educational achievement)
You might also want to have another look at some of those make-over programmes – surely this is just a case of middle class ‘experts’ empowering themselves through shaming the distasteful working classes?
Middle Class Identity – A Summary of a chapter of Steph Lawler’s book on class and identity
The British media love The Olympics, especially when ‘Team GB’ are so successful, but there’s a lot more to individual or even team success than just the individual athletes…Team GB’s success actually illustrates the relevance of Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration, as well as the damaging effects of class-divide in the UK (despite ‘our’ success)
The Olympics and Structuration Theory
(NB this is applying what Giddens’ actually meant by structuration, not how the concept has been over-simplified to the point of misrepresentation in every A level text book).
Structuration refers to the fact that structures enable individual action and are necessary to empower people, or necessary for people to realise their talents, or for people to ‘shine’ as individuals – there are several ways you can put it, and the concept stands against the postmodern ideas that there is no social structure any more and individuals are totally free agents).
While it obviously takes a lot of individual effort to be an Olympic athletes, there seemed to also be quite a lot of recognition of the fact that there is a lot of ‘structures’ in place behind these individual success – for example:
Lottery funding
The team of experts behind the athletes – coaches, physios, nutritionists
The years of planning, training and discipline building up to the Olympics
The idea that Olympic success is merely a story of individual success is clearly nonsense, and we could take the above further – in order for there to be an Olympics at all we need to have at least the following in place:
Nation States (or similar groupings which mean something to people)
Billion dollar infrastructure such as stadiums
A global communications network.
Having said all this, it’s unlikely that the ‘minions’ behind the successful athletes will see any real recognition – the chances are that it’s the individual athletes who’s stories will be told and the individual athletes who will receive honours. Thus is the dominance of the discourse of individualism.
The Olympics as an illustration of the class divide in the UK
‘There are more British Olympians who have a horsey relative named Portia than there are Olympians from working class backgrounds.’
Just a hypothesis for you -a reasonable one based on the actual social class stats on GB Olympians – According to the Independent you are more than four times more likely to be a top GB Olympian if you were privately educated – they made up 28% of the UK’s Olympic squad, while only making up 7% of the UK population as a whole – NB that 28% is up from 21% since the London Games.
This has a lot to do with private schools providing access not only to expensive elite sports such as rowing and dressage, but also providing higher quality coaching and facilities for the more accessible sports.
If you look at the medal tables, people from comprehensive schools do just as well (near enough, proportionally) compared to people from private schools, suggesting that when they get the opportunity, there is equality.
It seems rational to suggest that if we could harness the full-talent pool of the United Kingdom by getting more of the 93% (non-independent) kids into the Olympics squad, then we’d win even more medals, rather than our nation being held-back by the elites?
NB – If you think this is bleak, then this pattern of independent school privilege is mirrored in both university entrance and access to the top professions such as medicine, journalism and law. Recent research from 2016 –
Three-quarters (74%) of the UK’s top judges went to a fee-paying school
Slightly more than half of leading print journalists and solicitors (51% each) attended fee-paying schools.
Of course you’re not told this in the mainstream media – the class inequality that probably limits our medal prospects and the same class inequality that probably makes our top professions less-dynamic (and certainly less-diverse) – which is probably a reflection of the fact that it is precisely those people (independently educated) who fail to report on such things – they tend to see their careers, and the Olympians’ success as mostly down to individual efforts and generally fail to tell us about the significance of structure and structuration.
P.S. I’m calling this post ‘Sociology in the News (2) – given that the Olympics dominated the news for half of August.
There are three main types of crime prevention policy: situational, environmental and social/ community.
The three main types of crime control strategies are situation crime prevention, environmental crime prevention and community or social crime prevention strategies.
Situational crime prevention is very local – for example fixing shutters to a shop to make it harder to break into at night.
Environmental crime prevention is more regional and focused on a wider ‘problem area’ – an example is increasing Zero Tolerance Policing in a city with an increasing street-crime rate.
Community and social strategies are more focused on working with offenders or potential offenders and local communities to reduce offending.
This post has been written primarily as revision notes for A-level sociology students revising the Crime and Deviance topic.
Situational Crime Prevention
Includes strategies which focus on the specific point at which potential victims and criminals come together, making it harder for the criminal to commit crime.
Examples include ‘target hardening’ – shutters, window locks, anti-climb paint and also CCTV and security guards. Also ‘designing out’ features which encourage criminality – e.g. sloping seats at bus stops.
Based on rational choice theory and Cohen and Felson’s ‘Routine Activities’ theory which state that much crime is opportunistic, and if you reduce the opportunities to commit crime, you reduce the crime rate.
Appealed to policy makers because target hardening is cheap and simple.
Evaluations of Situational Crime Prevention
The Port Authority Bus Terminal Building is an example where this worked.
Newburn (2013) points to an obvious link between improved car security measures and reduced car crime.
Ignores factors such as inequality and deprivation as causes of crime (Garland 2001).
Ignores the role of emotion and thrill as a cause of crime (Lyng 1990)
Only tackles opportunistic street crime – won’t work for DV, white collar crime, or state crime.
It creates divided ‘Fortress cities’ (Bauman).
It leads to crime displacement.
Environmental Crime Prevention
Includes formal and informal social control measures which try to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and prevent an area from deteriorating.
Emphasises the role of formal control measures (the police) much more than situational crime prevention theory.
Examples include Zero Tolerance Policing, ASBOs, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders and the three strikes rule in America.
Based on Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows Theory – signs of physical disorder give off the message that there is low informal social control which attracts criminals and increases the crime rate.
Evaluations of Environmental Crime Prevention
The New York ‘Zero Tolerance’ study suggests that zero tolerance policies work to reduce crime.
HOWEVER, Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics found that this correlation was coincidental – other factors were responsible for the decline in crime.
It is more expensive than situational crime prevention – it takes a lot of police to patrol an area and clamp down on anti-social behaviour.
Reiner (2015) argues that the police would be better deployed focusing on more serious crime hot spots rather than clamping down on minor forms of anti-social behaviour.
From an Interactionist perspective, giving more power to the police will just lead to more labelling and more criminal careers.
Social and Community Crime Prevention
Focus on individual offenders and the social context which encourages them to commit crime.
There are two broad approaches – Intervention, identifying groups and risk of committing crime and taking action to limit their offending, and Community – involving the local community in combating crime.
Farrington’s (1995) longitudinal research comparing offenders and non offenders found various ‘risk factors’ which correlated with crime – such as low education and parental conflict.
Intervention programmes based on the above have included pre-school programmes to help with attainment and parenting classes.
Examples of this working include the Perry School Project (USA) and the Troubled Families Initiative (UK).
Evaluations of social and community crime reduction
If done effectively, these are the most costly of all crime prevention measures.
HOWEVER, if done properly, community prevention measures can save hundreds of thousands of pounds, by ‘turning’ a potential criminal into an employed tax-payer.
Marxists argue that these policies may tackle deprivation but they do not tackle the underlying structural inequalities in the Capitalist system which are the root cause.
Such approaches target working class, inner city communities and do not tackle elite crime.
Michel Foucalt and David Garland interpret the these strategies as being about surveillance and control rather than real social change which prevents crime.
Signposting
This post has been written primarily as revision notes for A-level sociology students revising the Crime and Deviance topic.
A brief summary of part of Arundhati Roy’s ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’ – In which she explores some of the consequences of privatisation (part of neoliberalisation) in India.
‘Trickle down hasn’t worked in India, but gush up certainly has’
The era of the privatisation of everything has made the Indian economy one of the fasted growing in the world and most of this wealth has gushed up to India’s Corporate Elite.
In India today, a nation of 1.2 billion people, one hundred people own assets equivalent to 25% of the GDP, while a 300 million strong middle class live among the ghosts of the 250 00 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves and the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed and live on less than twenty Indian rupees a day.
The most egregious expression of this inequality is Antilla, a building on Altamount Road in Mumbai which belongs to India’s richest man Mukesh Ambanni. It is the most expensive dwelling ever built: it has 27 floors, including 6 for parking, 3 helipads, 600 servants and a 27 story vertical wall of grass. Ambanni is worth $20 billion dollars and his company, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has a market capitalisation of $47 billion.
Ambanni’s RIL Corporation is one of a handful which run India, some of the others being Tata and Vedanta, the later of which are truly global in scope – Tata, for example, runs more than one hundred companies in 80 countries.
The consequence of this concentration of wealth, is an increase in corruption, or as Roy puts it – ‘As gush up continues, so more money flows through the institutions of government’. As an example, in 2011, a corrupt minister of communications and information undervalued 2G phone licences by $40 billion dollars, to the benefit of the telecommunications companies which now profit from them, effectively costing Indian taxpayers $40 billion of revenue.
How the Elite in India Benefit from Neoliberal Policies
The way this typically works is that a corrupt government official signs a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MoU) with a Corporation which privatises a chunk of publicly owned land, giving that corporation the right to use that land to establish a business – this either takes the form of mining the raw materials from under the land, or establishing a range of other projects such as Agribusinesses, Special Economic Zones, Dams, and even Formula One racing circuits.
Taxes are typically kept very low in these deals – often sow low in that local people see little of the financial benefit of the new business.
Chhattisgarh
This is especially true were mining is concerned. In 2005, for example, the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding with private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a pittance – royalties (effectively taxes) ranged from 0.5% to 7%, with the companies allowed to keep up to 99% of the revenue gained from these resources. (Allowing people like Ambanni to build their 27 story houses, rather than the money being used for food for the majority of the Indian population.)
In a third strand of Neoliberal policy, companies are subjected to very little regulation. It seems that they are allowed to develop their projects without protecting the environment or paying any compensation to people who are negatively affected by these projects, as indicated in the case study below:
Tata Steel in Chhattisgarh, North East India
Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU with Tata Steel, a vigilante militia was established (known as the Salwa Judum). Organised by the state government and funded by Tata Steel the Salwa Judum initiated a ground clearance operation to eradicate the local forest peoples so Tata could set up its steel plant.
The Salwa Judum
The Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through 600 local villages forcing 50 000 people into police camps and displacing a further 350 000. To keep these displaced persons in check, the government then deployed 200 000 paramilitary troops to the region to make sure that it remained a stable climate for investment and economic growth.
An Adivasi (local tribal group) protest
According to Roy the government has labelled these people ‘Maoist Rebels’, but in reality they are just displaced peoples.
A new monthly post outlining recent programmes relevant to Sociology on TV – most will be on the BBC as iPlayer’s what I mainly use to access televisual hyperreality.
Just one to kick off with – because I just watched it. This might well be the only programme and the only post too, this kind of thing’s got ‘summer project, no way I’ll keep this up when term starts’ written all the way through it.
Useful for showing the extent of inequality in Britain, and providing an insight into life in low-pay work. You could supplement this with Polly Toynbe’s ‘Hard Work’ which provides more in-sight through participant observation and interviews.
A documentary in which 20 workers compete against each other in some of Britain’s lowest wage jobs – after four hours in each job, the least productive workers get sent home. In the first episode the workers work as hotel cleaners and as waste-pickers (recycling paper).
This is actually quite an insightful documentary – the whole process is overseen by a manager who analyses performance data, which is benchmarked against industry averages – 24 minutes to clean a hotel room, 100KG of paper waste picked in an hour per person (roughly – actually I think that was right, sounds like a lot of paper) – so you get a decent look at what life is like in these jobs, and what people have to actually do for minimum wage.
Of course you get the usual life-stories from the various workers, but this in itself is quite interesting too – most of them seem to have suffered genuine hardship, in the form of coming from a deprived background or having lost a decent job – so they all seem to actually need a job. In other words, these aren’t your usual people – not the privileged middle classes
Which is unlike the presenter and the various journalists she interviews who provide no real insight into how we got into this mess in the first place.
So an odd one this – the bits I usually find interesting (the analysis) isn’t and the bits I usually fast-forward – the personal-stuff is more interesting.
Evidence from Kat Banyard (2010) The equality illusion– the truth about women and men today, Faber and Faber.
Today it is normal for women to worry about their looks. Girls have starkly different relationships to their bodies than boys – they put greater emphasis on how attractive their bodies are to others – for boys physical prowess – what he can actually achieve is more important than looks. Banyard cites the following evidence to support her view that women are more concerned about their looks than men –
1. 1.5 million people in the UK have an eating disorder – 90% of them women and girls
2. A survey conducted by Dove of 3000 women found that 90% of them wanted to change some aspect of their body with body weight and shape being the main concern.
3. One in four women has considered plastic surgery.
4. An analysis of animated cartoons shows that female characters are far more likely to be portrayed as physically attractive than male characters and those who are attractive are far more likely to be portrayed as intelligent, employed, happy, loving and involved in kissing and hugging.
5. In 2007 a survey of Brownies aged 7-10 were asked to describe ‘planet sad’ they spoke of it being inhabited by girls who were fat and bullied about their appearance.
6. A survey conducted in 2009 found that a quarter of girls thought it was more important to be beautiful than clever. – Youngpoll.com
7. The more mainstream media high school students watch, the more they believe beauty is important according to the American Psychological Association.
8. The media furore over Susan Boyle was mainly because she didn’t conform to the female stereotype of beauty.
9. In 2009 the Bank of England held a seminar for its female employees called ‘dress for success’ – where they were informed, amongst other things, to ‘always wear make up’, there was no such equivalent for men
10. Some studies have shown that the more a girl monitors her appearance, the less satisfied she will be with her appearance.
11. Two thirds of women report having avoided activities such as going swimming or going to a party because they feel bad about their appearance while 16% of 15 -17 year olds have avoided going to school for the same reason.
12. One experiment found that female students performed worse in maths tests when wearing a swim suit compared to regular clothes while boy’s performance doesn’t decrease under the same conditions
Analysis – what Banyard actually thinks is wrong/ harmful about this situation…
‘The existence of a suffocating ideal of beauty has persisted and it has remained a gendered phenomenon. Women are judged on their ability to conform to a beauty ideal – there is a cultural pressure to manipulate their bodies to fit into a pre-existing ideal – to treat your body as an object that will be consumed by an observing public (This is known as objectification)
While some Feminists argue that the Feminine pursuit of beauty is simply a matter of choice – women freely choose to do it (Baumgardner) others (Jefferys) argue that the practise of beautification reflect and perpetuate gender inequalities – women put effort into displaying their femininity/ sexuality because they are relatively powerless – and those women that do engage in the practise of beautification perpetuate the idea that a woman’s value is in her beauty.
Millions of girls and women begin their days with beautification rituals because their sense of self hinges on the gaze of others. If your sense of self esteem depends on what you think others think of your appearance, can you really be said to have freedom of choice? Also, can you really say women are equal to men in this respect?
One of the reasons for the persistent problems of body image faced by females is that girls are taught from a very young age that their physical appearance is a reflection of their worth and value, and treated accordingly.
A summary of Michel Foucault’s work on identity, deviance and normality, governmentality, subjectification and technologies of the self, taken from Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ (2014) – also includes Nikolas Rose’s development of Foucault’s work. 
A brief summary of part of Arundhati Roy’s ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’ – In which she explores some of the consequences of privatisation (part of neoliberalisation) in India.
