What is the problem in empirical analytical social sciences with definitions?
- often in empirical-analytical sciences we look at a dataset and “mindlessly” adopt a variable
- thereby we forget that definitions always imply a view of a phenomenon that highlights particular (deemed crucial) aspects while disregarding others (see previous discussion of “abstraction”)
- AND sometimes it can be very fruitful to look closely at what is being left out when adopting a specific variable/definition - In particular, as definitions in the social sciences often start from a pre-scientific “common sense” view of reality (i.e. why not look at East-West Germany and their conflict as an ethnic conflict?)
Constructivist & critical: critique and approaches
Constructivist and critical perspectives in the social sciences tend to frame empirical-analytical social sciences for being a little bit mindless + often severely constrained by common sense thinking
- Constructivist argument: We have to approach our own society like an ethnographer would approach a completely foreign society and question the most “natural” arrangements (i.e. why more people in East-Germany vote for the AfD) - ask the most basic questions and try to get them at its core, only then will we be able to get deep insights into society (discipline -> Ethno-methodology: when we behave inappropriately, then we will irritate other people and will reveal the unwritten rules)
- Critical argument: The taken-for-granted elements of the “common sense” are often indicative of power relations in society. Not questioning them as a researcher, implicitly, means to serve the powerful
What does the labeling approach say to the study of crime?
“Social groups create deviance by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender. The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.”
-> quite radical
- focus = labelling process -> how does it come that some crimes are labelled as such whereas others don’t?
- Examples
1. WM in Qatar where homosexuality is a crime
2. Suddenly, not stealing if insurance company says so, bc they don’t want to pay
Recall Nagin and Paternoster’s (1994) rational choice model of offending. What is the view of the deviant in this model? How is it different from the labelling approach?
- Focusing on the person: The deviant is someone who is characterized by present orientation and self-centeredness and who was not fortunate enough to nevertheless develop strong conventional attachments and commitments
- Focus not on law, institutions, power-relations
What is the heuristic value of the labelling approach?
Two research questions were motivated by he labeling approach (not posed before, so heuristic value aka ability to develop new knowledge by paradigmatic shift):
- How and why are particular persons/group labeled as deviant?
- What happens when they are so defined?
How and why are particular persons/group labeled as deviant?
hypothesis
“Status characteristics hypothesis”
Status attributes (i.e. economic resources, gender, legal status - for everyone different) influence who is labeled
What happens when they are defined/labeled as deviant?
hypothesis
“Secondary deviance hypothesis”
Labeling experiences produce problems of adjustment and cause further deviance - if u are sent to prison, much more likely to develop a criminal identity, law-enforcement can be counter-productive
upper part = “path of destruction” is not necessarily determined
Primary deviance VS Secondary deviance
Primary deviance
- initial acts of deviance -> only minor consequences for a person’s status, social relationships, or subsequent behavior
- tends to be situational, transient, and idiosyncratic
- most people “violate many laws during their lifetimes” and that the average law-abiding citizen commits many acts that technically are crimes, but are not serious enough to be viewed as crimes either by the perpetrator or the rest of society (i.e. not having a bus ticket and only realizing it later on)
Secondary deviance
- explicitly, a response to societal reactions to deviance and has major consequences for a person’s status, relationships, and future behavior
- occurs when society’s negative response to a person’s initial deviance—such as stigmatizing, punishing, and segregating the offender—causes fundamental changes in the person’s social roles, self-identity, and personality
- increases the probability of future secondary deviant acts. Whereas the primary deviant’s life and identity are organized around conventional activities, the “secondary deviant’s life and identity are organized around the facts of deviance” (Lemert, 1967: 41).
Most radical version of labeling approach
There is no such thing as crime/deviance as such, it is entirely socially constructed
- not really supported by data = caricature version
- “Labeling theory was also damaged by an important empirical reality: the finding that many youths were highly involved in antisocial and criminal conduct prior to any criminal justice labeling by the state.” (Cullen et al. 2020, p. 256)
BUT we don’t have to adopt the most radical approach, enough to say there are some mechanisms highlighted by the labeling approach that have been previously out of sight, but now can be integrated in empirical-analytical theory development and research
To what extent and under what conditions do status attributes influence who is labeled?
Research on discrimination
More likely to be stopped by police if you belong to a certain gender or racial or age group, so, it is clear that police action is quite targeted
To what extent and under what conditions do labeling experiences cause further deviance?
Research on the effects of (first) juvenile arrests
- All three hypothesis found support = in favor of labeling approach
- Problem: 2nd test
“One limitation of the current study is that it excludes the highest rate offenders for whom no matched nonarrestees were found with a comparable propensity to be arrested. Hence, we have no empirical basis to estimate how such extremely high-propensity youth would fare if not arrested because all such youth in the PHDCN were arrested. Possibly, the highest propensity youth are already so firmly on a deviant trajectory that a formal arrest has little effect either on their behavior or on societal responses. Or perhaps cumulative disadvantage makes first arrests especially likely to result in secondary deviance and/or secondary sanctioning for such high-propensity youth.” –> if they have certain characteristics and get closer to a propensity of 1 - it gets harder to find others to match them - Explanation: there is just a very tiny percentage of 5% that account for 50% of crimes and 70% of all violence (high impulsivity, disorder whatsoever) and maybe the labeling approach is downplaying the personal dimension -> not one or the other, both approaches might play a role, not one view of crime the right one
Definition of crime by Per-Olof Wikström & possible problematic?
- Defining crime Crimes have three main features: they are 1) actions (including omissions) that 2) break rules of conduct that are 3) stated in law
- What all crimes have in common is that they are actions that breaks rules of conduct, and what differentiates crimes from other acts of rulebreaking is that they are stated in law. At the core of the explanation of the causes of crime is an understanding of why people follow and break rules of conduct (the explanation of crime being a special case of the wider explanation of why people break any rules of conduct)
- Could be criticized with the labeling approach: Who makes the rules of conduct? What about changing moral views? Beating children in earlier times crime or not? With this definition it would be not - actually very little would be
The ethnic boundary-making approach
Point of departure
- The problematic tendency to reify (vergegenständlichen) ethnic groups in the social sciences -> sometimes not so easy to categorize a person into an ethnic class, for example Philippine dad and Chinese mom, or grandparents were born in Germany but today no longer Germany but Poland (as soon as you look at it from a historic perspective, you’re units of analysis become quite blurry)
- Some German researchers tend to view the German population as some with Turkish origin, some with Russian origin, etc. can be problematic as we tend to attribute to those communities a high level of solidarity, but research has shown trust lies only within family, if shown a picture of some random person with Turkish roots, trust is not higher than for other strangers
What are social boundaries?
people’s distinctions and definitions of group membership that affect how they act towards another (e.g., Barth 1969, Bourdieu 1979, Ridgeway 1997, Lamont/Molnár 2002, Wimmer 2013)
What does the boundary making approach aim at?
“Instead of treating ethnicity as an unproblematic explanans (what is used to explain)— providing self-evident units of analysis and self-explanatory variables—the boundary-making paradigm takes ethnicity as an explanandum, as a variable outcome of specific processes to be analytically uncovered and empirically specified.” (Wimmer 2009: 244)
Four principles according to Wimmer
Constructivist Groups are made (not given by god or whatsoever) …
Subjectivist …based on constructed differences (highlighted or
invented)…
Interactionist …and acts of social distancing…
Processualist …which unfolds over time
How are boundaries drawn? (Wimmer 2009)
(1) shifting boundaries (of who belongs to a group)
Actors may attempt to pursue different strategies. Individual strategies possible as well as group strategies, all could adapt all strategy Differentiates between:
- Expansion: …to shift a boundary to a more inclusive level than the existing one (e.g., in France great research on nation-building: previously, just have been peasants, but then tried to build the nation via i.e. schooling where they had to learn a certain version of French, French history getting rid of local identities and expanding the national identity, or, let’s think of us as Europeans instead of to a nation belonging )
- Contraction: …to shift a boundary to a more exclusive level than the existing one (e.g., defining “German” identity based on ancestry and not on passport, meaning being visibly German)
Example study :
“Hypothetical immigrant”
setup
- Module of the European Social Survey
- Respondents were first asked: “Please tell me how important you think each of these things should be in deciding whether someone born, brought up and living outside [country] should be able to come and live here.”
- They were then shown a card with the following statements: (1) be white, (2) come from a Christian background, (3) speak [one of] the official languages of [country], (4) be commit- ted to the way of life in [country], (5) have good educational qualifications, and (6) have work skills that [country] needs six symbolic boundaries measured in these questions as race, religion, language, culture, education, and occupation.
Example study :
“Hypothetical immigrant”
research question
Where there is a high contestedness in language boundary, does it affect immigrant’s well-being, especially if they have language problems?
Example study :
“Hypothetical immigrant”
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1. Symbolic boundaries against immigrants with certain traits reduce subjective well-being among those first- and second-generation immigrants who have these traits. We expect no significant impact of boundary strength and contestedness on the well-being of those who are not excluded by the boundary (-> only if you have language problems, you should be affected by symbolic boundaries)
Hypothesis 2. The stronger the symbolic boundaries against immigrants with certain traits, the greater the negative impact of these boundaries on the subjective well-being of first- and second-generation immigrants.
- Hypothesis 3 and 4 opposites: concensus vs contestedness
Hypothesis 3. The greater the consensus on a symbolic boundary against immigrants— i.e. the lower its contestedness—the greater the negative impact on the subjective wellbeing of those first- and second-generation immigrants excluded by the boundary.
- In contrast, Wimmer’s (2008b) theory of ethnic boundary-making argues that the contestedness of a symbolic boundary strengthens its (political) salience. This is likely to affect immigrants’ subjective well-being, as they see their lives and daily interactions through the lenses of this potential social boundary (kriegen ihr eigenes defizit constant vorgehalten)
Hypothesis 4. The lower the consensus on a symbolic boundary against immigrants—i.e. the greater its contestedness—the greater the negative impact on the subjective wellbeing of those first- and second-generation immigrants excluded by the boundary
Example study :
“Hypothetical immigrant”
Results (1)
Only where there is high-contestedness aka lack of consensus, language problems are associated negatively with subjective well-being
Example study :
“Hypothetical immigrant”
Results (2)
not only different averages but also different spread Luxembourg high consensus on language (almost everyone agrees on importance) while no such strong consensus in Sweden (people in Sweden have different views on it)
Critical Race Theory
- conceptualizes race as a product of law, ideology, and social relations
- law does not simply reflect ideas about race but constructs race: basis for group differentiation, entrenching the idea that there are “in fact” different races;
- law has helped to
1) determine the racial categories (e.g., Black, White, Yellow) into which institutions and individuals place people
2) set forth criteria or rules (e.g., phenotype and ancestry) by which we map people into those racial categories
3) assign social meaning to the categories (e.g., Whites are superior; Blacks are inferiors; Japanese Americans are disloyal)
4) has employed those meanings to structure hierarchical arrangements (e.g., legalized slavery for inferior people (Blacks) and
5) legalized internment for people who are disloyal (people of Japanese descent) - and those legal arrangements, in turn, have functioned to confirm the social meanings that law helped to create (e.g., the people who are enslaved must be inferior; that is why they are enslaved; the people who are interned must be disloyal; that is why they are interned).”
-> Shares the perspective of ethnic boundary making
How are boundaries drawn? (Wimmer 2009)
(2) Modify boundaries
leaving boundaries untouched but chang meaning or interpretation of persons who belong
- Transvaluation: …to re-interpret or change the normative principles of stratified ethnic systems (normative inversion or equalization) (e.g., Black power movement: we identify as black but we are actually the better ones, Indian Hip-hop movement) - more about a collective strategy
- Crossing: …to change their individual ethnic membership (e.g., “passing” for white in the US or African American who distance themselves from even further marginalized Native Americans)
- Blurring: …emphasize other, non-ethnic attributes and divisions (not everything is about ethnic boundaries, we don’t need to highlight ethnic boundaries, e.g., “We are all soccer fans.” - important empirically)
