Deviance Management examines how individuals and subcultures manage the stigma of being labeled socially deviant. Exploring high-tension religious groups, white power movements, paranormal subcultures, LGBTQ groups, drifters, recreational drug and alcohol users, and more, the authors identify how and when people combat, defy, hide from, or run from being stigmatized as “deviant.” While most texts emphasize the criminological features of deviance, the authors’ coverage here showcases the diversity of social and noncriminal deviance. Deviance Management allows for a more thorough understanding of strategies typically used by normalization movements to destigmatize behaviors and identities while contributing to the study of social movements and intra-movement conflict.
Christopher D. Bader is Professor of Sociology at Chapman University. He is coauthor of America's Four Gods, Faithful Measures, and Paranormal America. Joseph O. Baker is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at East Tennessee State University and coauthor of American Secularism and Paranormal America.
"Bader and Baker have produced an outstanding book in Deviance Management. Drawing on insights from sociology and social psychology, they developed a dynamic model that explains the evolution of deviant subcultures and the strategies that people employ to manage stigmatized social identities. Revealing the advantages of a relational perspective, their theory advances the state of the art in the study of culture and social change. Their theory is applied to deeply compelling case studies, which make the book accessible to a wide variety of readers."—Steven Pfaff, Professor of Sociology, University of Washington
"Baker and Bader offer a new identity-management framework for categorizing deviance. This is one of the most theoretically innovative works in half a century, and it may prove to be a way to breathe new life into what should be one of sociology’s most vibrant fields."—Joel Best, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware
"Today, deviant behavior is not merely departure from standard norms, but estrangement of a vast diversity of subcultures and identities that are incompatible with each other, but often overlap in membership, requiring deviance management strategies that this book clearly delineates, benefiting all readers who seek to understand the human condition."—William Sims Bainbridge, author of Dynamic Secularization and The Social Structure of Online Communities
"The sociology of deviance has struggled to carve a place of relevance for itself that is distinct from criminology. Baker and Bader’s Deviance Management may just be the book that accomplishes that goal. They explain six principles of deviance and identity management, and illustrate them with rich material from their own and others’ timely research on such diverse phenomena as the Westboro Baptist Church, white power hate groups, and Bigfoot enthusiasts, as well as social movements that fight against deviant labels. I will use this book, and I strongly recommend it to all my colleagues who teach deviance courses."—Jeffrey T. Ulmer, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University
"Presents a theoretical perspective grounded in empirical evidence that challenges scholars to reconsider how deviance is normalized, the inherent conflicts within social movements, and the intricacies of adaptation strategies."—Xavier Perez, Professor of Criminology, DePaul University
232 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w line art, 4 b/w photographs
9780520304499$34.95|£30.00Paper
Sep 2019