“There is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the organism. But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe kinds of behavior that are regarded as deviant. For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy behavior… The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does. It accepts the lay judgment of something as deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its source within the individual, thus preventing us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial part of the phenomenon.”

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 5-6.

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Howard S. Becker35

American sociologist 1928

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“In addition to recognizing that deviance is created by the responses of people to particular kinds of behavior, by the labeling of that behavior as deviant, we must also keep in mind that the rules created and maintained by such labeling are not universally agreed to. Instead, they are the object of conflict and disagreement, part of the political process of society.”

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Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 18.

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Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 26-27.

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