Drug Addiction as a Deviant Career

Abstract

“Career” evokes symbols of a society's work order. Males are processed in accordance with social production rules to assume roles at work. When these roles are associated with high dignity, much ceremony, severe training, and a long and presumably regular life, they are frequently called professions. Slight reductions in dignity, ceremony, training, and patterned regularity entitle work roles to be called occupations. In either case, adult socialization has succeeded. The men have gone to work. The adjustment they make to institutions, formal organizations, informal relations, the sequence of roles they follow, the identities they assume and shed—all this constitutes having a career.