A Deviance Perspective on Social Movements: The Case of Animal Rights Activism

Abstract

This article outlines a theoretical framework for understanding deviance and deviance-management in a social movement context. Such a deviance perspective is useful because in striving for social change, activists challenge existing social norms and may readily be defined by their environments as “outsiders” or deviants. However, activists also differ from traditional deviant groups. The article therefore conceptualizes activists as “entrepreneurial deviants,” combining features of both moral entrepreneurs and deviants in society, as presented in Howard Becker's classical theory. It is argued that in order to understand the strategies of deviance-management performed by activists, traditional notions of “passing,” “techniques of neutralization,” and “subculture” must be complemented by the concepts of “confronting,” “techniques of idealization,” and the forming of a “transformative subculture.” Empirically, the article builds on a case study of animal rights activism in Sweden and the ways in which the activists counter stereotypes, which is interpreted as a form of deviance-management.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the collaboration with Niklas Hansson in data collection, for the helpful editing by Lia Antoniou and for funding from the Swedish Research Council and The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Notes

¹If one is aware of the vital differences between activists and other types of positive deviants stemming from activists’ specific position in the moral order, it might still be possible to conceptualize social movement activists in those terms. Entrepreneurial deviance would then constitute a seventh type of positive deviance in addition to the six types acknowledged in Heckert's scheme (1998). This means that “entrepreneurial deviance” (denoting individuals, primarily activists, committed to following and pursuing moral ideals based on which they confront and seek to transform the normative order) is related to, but also different from, “altruism” (involving individuals who voluntarily assist other people without any expectation of reward, such as saints or good neighbors); “charisma” (referring to individuals endowed with exceptional powers of attraction, such as Jesus or Gandhi); “innovation” (including individuals who combine already existing cultural elements in a novel fashion or produce new ones, such as Noble Prize winners); “supra-conformity” (consisting of individuals who are conform to the point of reaching that which is idealized for a particular norm in society, such as straight-A students and athletes); “innate characteristics” (including individuals who are socially defined as endowed with extraordinary inborn qualities, such as intelligence and beauty); and “ex-deviants” (comprising previously stigmatized individuals that manage to convert to the status of normal and become purified, such as a skillful person with a physical disability).

²We here follow the original formulation by Sykes and Matza (1957). Meanwhile, the notion of techniques of neutralization has greatly expanded and been given new meanings (see Christensen 2010). Even though what we call techniques of idealization bear similarities with “appealing to higher loyalties” in Sykes and Matza's theory, we argue that, in contrast to the rationale of this technique, activists also repudiate numerous imperatives of the dominant normative system.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonas Lindblom

JONAS LINDBLOM is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Mälardalen University, Sweden. He is currently involved in two research projects: one on social movements, focusing particularly on the animal rights movement, and a project on how the media portrays and influences scientific controversies.

Kerstin Jacobsson

KERSTIN JACOBSSON is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her current research is on social movements in Central and Eastern Europe, including a study of animal rights activism in Poland.