The Intellectual Debt That Deviance Theory Owes Talcott Parsons

Abstract

As Talcott Parsons pointed out, deviance is always defined and responded to in terms of shared symbolic criteria of legitimacy or illegitimacy. Partial legitimation of the deviant act provides justification to the potential behavioral deviant for expressing deviant inclinations and simultaneously undercuts the willingness of conforming persons to visit negative sanctions upon him. The 1974 streaking phenomenon illustrates this insight.

Legitimation is relevant for explaining deviance partly because deviant motivation is omnipresent - in the form of ambivalence - even in outward conformists. If both conforming motivation and deviant motivation contain varying proportions of inclinations to conform to rules and to violate them, behavioral deviants are only slightly different from behavioral conformists in the organization of their personality systems. Thus, personality systems may have only a limited role in the etiology of deviant behavior - even if they play a significant role in the genesis of deviant motivation.