What’s Deviant? Topics That Instructors Highlight in Their Deviance Course

ABSTRACT

To determine what sociologists of deviance actually teach in their course of the same name, I requested a copy of a syllabus from their instructors at roughly 600 nonrandomly chosen sociology departments in the United States and Canada; in addition, I harvested two dozen or so syllabi that instructors posted on the Internet. My sample came to 229 syllabi, again, for a nonrandom selection of deviance courses taught in North America. Instructors of the course divided into two camps: those who organize the course around generic concepts and theories that, presumably, apply with more-or-less equal force to all or most forms of deviance (a minority, 77, or 34%, took this route), and those instructors who organize the course mainly around particular types, examples, or forms of deviance (the majority, 152 or 66% of the total). Of all the deviant types, illicit drug use (129 mentions), violence (128), sexual deviancies (118), mental disorder/mental illness (96), undesirable physical characteristics (86), and white-collar crime (81) made up the top half-dozen instances of the deviancies mentioned. Judging from the topics chosen, I surmise that instructors selected their subject matter on the basis of varying criteria; a few include idealism, ideology, politics, consequentiality, commonness, known-aboutness, and their relationship with parallel topics in the field of criminology, constitute some of the most common such criteria. It is unlikely that exhortation from the field’s critics will change their minds on the matter.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Barbara Weinstein for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Barry Winograd for sharing recollections about the life of Jerry Simmons. In addition, Leora Lawton, Kenneth Culton, Leon Anderson, and Michael Brandt contributed useful comments on their choice of highlighted deviance topics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Erich Goode

Erich Goode is Sociology Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Deviant Behavior (13th edition, Routledge, 2023), and Celluloid Mischief: Crime and Deviance on the Silver Screen (Routledge, 2023).