Moral Entrepreneurs: The Creation & Enforcement of Deviant Categories

1. Moral Entrepreneurs: The Creation & Enforcement of Deviant Categories Howard S. Becker

2. Moral entrepreneurs • moral entrepreneurs are people who seek to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm • they may create “moral panics” around perceived urgent problems, e.g., • drinking alcohol or sexual psychopathy • moral entrepreneurs can be divided into: • rule creators • rule enforcers

3. Eighteenth Amendment • The 18th Amendment of the US Constitution (ratified in 1919), along with the Volstead Act, established Prohibition (of "intoxicating liquors,“ except those used for religious purposes) in the US. • Demand for liquor continued, with the following results: • criminalization of producers, suppliers, transporters and consumers • police, courts and prisons were overwhelmed with new cases • organized crime increased in power • corruption extended among law enforcement officials • The amendment was repealed in 1933 by ratification of the 21st Amendment, the only instance in US history of repeal of a constitutional amendment

4. Rule creators • Rule creators: “moral crusaders,” fervent, righteous, often self-righteous • Mission is to promote their sense of morality - thereby defining and combating deviance - for the presumed good of others • Chief concern is the ends - persuasion of others - not the means by which persuasion is achieved • Successful moral crusades are generally dominated by those in the upper social strata of society • They must build public awareness of a problem, and have power, public support, and a clear and acceptable solution to the problem •  tend to have “strange bedfellows,” e.g., • overlap & cooperation among Temperance, Abolitionist, Women’s Rights, and anti-Child Labor movements in the late-19th, early 20th centuries • alliance formation among conservative Christian activists and Feminists in recent campaigns against human trafficking

5. Rule enforcers • Successful crusades produce new sets of rules & enforcement agents/agencies, thus institutionalizing the crusade • Rule enforcers, e.g., police, are compelled by two drives: • the need to justify their own role • the need to win respect in interactions • They are in a bind: if they show too much effectiveness one might say they are not needed, and if they show too little effectiveness one might say they are failing • Rule enforcers feel the need to enforce the rule because that is their job; they are not really concerned with the content of the rule • As rules are changed, something that was once acceptable may now be punished and vice versa  Such officials tend to take a pessimistic view of human nature due to constant exposure to willful deviance

6. Selective enforcement • a good deal of enforcement activity is devoted not to the actual enforcement of rules, but to coercing respect from the people the enforcer deals with • people may be labeled deviant not due to breaking a rule but showing disrespect

7. Selective enforcement (cont’d) • Whether a person who commits a deviant act is in fact labeled a deviant depends on things besides his actual behavior: • whether official feels pressure at the time to justify his/her position • whether respect is shown to enforcer • whether the “fix is in” • amateurs tend to be caught, convicted, and labeled deviant much more than professionals (who know the “fixer”) • whether the kind of act committed is high on enforcer’s priority list

8. Symbolic Crusade From Joseph R. GusfieldSymbolic Crusade (Urbana-Champaign: University of IlIinois Press, 1963)

9. In US, conflicts tend to be organized along cultural lines • US lacked the class divisions & conflict found in Europe •  relative consensus on fundamental economic matters •  differences between ethnic groups, cultures, and religious organizations assume greater importance • "...agreement on fundamentals will permit almost every kind of social conflict, tension and difference to find political expression." (Benson, op. cit., p. 275)

10. Moral reform as a political & social issue • Moral reforms are efforts by moral people to correct the behavior of the immoral people • Moral reforms a way cultural groups act to preserve, defend, or enhance the dominance and prestige of their own ways of life • Moral reform is a “disinterested reform,” divorced from any direct economic interests

11. The Temperance Movement • In Temperance, (moral) abstainers sought to correct the behavior of (immoral) drinkers • Since drinking and nondrinking have been ways to identify the members of a subculture, drinking and abstinence became symbols of social status • Temperance was one way in which a declining social elite – New England WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) – tried to retain its social power & leadership • “During the 1820's, the men who founded the Temperance movement sought to make Americans into a clean, sober, godly, and decorous people whose aspirations and style of living would reflect the moral leadership of New England Federalism”

12. Temperance goes national • Starting in the1830s, abstinence becomes a part of public morality, a symbol of middle-class membership and a necessity for social mobility • Abstinence is highly symbolic, seen as separating: • the industrious from the deadbeat • the steady worker from the unreliable drifter • the good credit risk from the bad gamble • the “native American” (i.e., US-born) from the immigrant

13. Assimilative vs Coercive Reform • Temperance featured two types of disinterested reform: • assimilative reform: seeks to assimilate drinkers (largely identified with the poor, the alien, and the downtrodden) into the social system, to follow the reformer's habits and lift selves to middle-class respect and income • coercive reform: since the dominance of his culture and the social status of his group are denied, the coercive reformer turns to law and force as ways to affirm it

14. 19th-century vs 20th-century America • Abstinence was “in” in the 19th century, “out” in the 20th • Local culture of “small-town” America is increasingly challenged by the rise of a nationalized culture and an industrial economy of mass organizations • In the shift from commercial to industrial society, values of self-control, impulse renunciation, discipline, and sobriety decline in importance • Interest in interpersonal relations and conspicuous consumption replaces interest in work and morality

15. Prohibition • The Eighteenth Amendment was the high point of the struggle to assert the public dominance of old middle-class values. It established the victory of Protestant over Catholic, rural over urban, tradition over modernity, the middle class over both the lower and the upper strata

16. Culture Wars – Then & Now • “There has been a decline in the social status of the old middle class and in the dominance of his values. This sense of anger at the loss of status and bitterness about lowered self-esteem pervades the entire Temperance movement today.” • “Temperance has been one of the classic issues on which divergent cultures have faced each other in America. Such issues of style have been significant because they have been ways through which groups have tried to handle the problems which have been important to them.” • What about today? What issues are important to today’s “declining class”?