Deviance: Definition and Theories in Sociology

What deviance means in sociology

Sociologists define deviance as any violation of shared social norms, whether those norms are customs, everyday habits, or laws a community treats as binding.

OpenStax describes it as a broader concept than crime, since it covers behavior that breaks a social expectation even when no law is involved. Showing up late to appointments as a habit, dressing in a way a context considers odd, breaking a food custom the group takes for granted: these are all deviant acts that, in most cases, stay perfectly legal.

Deviance, crime, and social control

Among deviant behaviors, society treats crime as the most serious, because it carries formal sanctions: fines, trials, prison time. What separates deviance from illegality is the legal norm, the rule written down and enforced by the state; other social norms, the ones governing manners or group customs, lack that backing but still shape how harshly a community judges whoever breaks them.

Social control is the set of mechanisms a society uses to enforce its shared norms, and it works in two ways. Informal control runs through people’s direct reactions in everyday interactions: a disapproving look, a comment, being left out of a group. Formal control runs through official institutions, such as the justice system, which recognize and punish norm violations through codified procedures. Both levels also work in the opposite direction: public praise can reward conformity just as a fine discourages deviance.

Durkheim: deviance as a structural fact, and anomie

Durkheim argued that deviance is not a flaw to be removed but a structural feature of any society that functions.

No community, however orderly, manages to bring it down to zero.

Deviance tests a society’s existing norms, and punishing it serves to restate and reinforce the rules the community shares.

Durkheim linked deviance to the concept of anomie, which in his original use describes a state of normlessness: a condition in which a society’s shared moral rules weaken or break down.

Merton and strain theory

Merton kept Durkheim’s vocabulary but gave it a different content: for him, anomie is not the absence of rules but the contradiction between goals a culture keeps holding up as valid, financial success above all, and the real shortage of legitimate means to reach them, the same social mobility that lets someone improve their standing. According to OpenStax, it is this strain that pushes some people toward deviance.

Merton described five ways of responding to that gap. Someone who conforms accepts both the goals and the legitimate means society recognizes. Someone who innovates shares the goals but pursues them through means that are not approved or are illegal. Someone who chooses ritualism gives up the higher-value goals but keeps following the approved rules and routines anyway. Someone who retreats rejects both the goals and the legitimate means, effectively stepping outside the social game. Someone who rebels rejects the existing goals and means and, unlike the person who retreats, replaces them with new ones, alternatives to the dominant model.

Practical example: picture two people who grew up in the same neighborhood, both convinced that financial success is a legitimate goal worth pursuing. One takes a job that pays little but is stable, and scales back their ambitions: that is ritualism. The other, without access to an education that opens better doors, starts selling stolen goods to reach the same goal: that is innovation, in Merton’s terms.

Labeling: Lemert and Howard Becker

Lemert distinguished two types of deviance based on their effect on a person’s identity. Primary deviance is a norm violation that stays a one-off episode, never labeled in public: it does not change how the person sees themselves or their relationships. Secondary deviance appears once the public label of “deviant” genuinely reshapes the person’s self-image, pushing them to act in ways that match the label they received.

Howard Becker pushed this idea to a radical conclusion in his book Outsiders (1963): deviance arises from a two-step social process, in which a group sets the rules and then applies them to whoever it decides to view with suspicion. For Becker, what makes a person deviant is mainly the fact that the label stuck, thanks to others — a mechanism close to how prejudice and stereotypes work, where it is the group’s gaze that fixes an identity onto a person.

Secondary deviance arises as a consequence of other people’s reaction to the deviant act, and it is the one with real consequences for a person’s life: once someone starts using the deviant behavior, or a role built around it, as a way to cope with the problems that reaction created, the label stops being a description and becomes part of the social status and role the person occupies.

Practical example: a student skips school once; for Lemert, that stays a case of primary deviance, with no impact on identity. But if teachers and classmates start treating that student as “the troublemaker,” and the student starts acting the part to match the label, that is the secondary deviance Lemert described and Becker later built on.

Social control, formal and informal

Social control regulates deviance and conformity together, and the norms it enforces do not come out of nowhere: people learn them through socialization, the process by which someone absorbs their group’s rules from childhood on. Someone who has internalized a norm follows it even without outside enforcement; someone who has not stays exposed to the sanctions, formal or informal, a society reserves for rule-breakers.

Durkheim and Merton focus on the social conditions that lead someone to break a norm in the first place. Lemert and Becker pick up from there, looking at what happens once that break becomes public and a label sticks to the person responsible.