Moral Entrepreneurs: The Creation

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Moral Entrepreneurs The Creation Enforcement
of Deviant Categories

• Howard S. Becker

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Moral entrepreneurs

• moral entrepreneurs are people who seek to
  influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm
• they may create moral panics around perceived
  urgent problems, e.g.,
• drinking alcohol or sexual psychopathy
• moral entrepreneurs can be divided into
• rule creators
• rule enforcers

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Eighteenth amendment

• The 18th Amendment of the US Constitution
  (ratified in 1919), along with the Volstead Act,
  established Prohibition (of "intoxicating
  liquors, except those used for religious
  purposes) in the US.
• Demand for liquor continued, with the following
  results
• criminalization of producers, suppliers,
  transporters and consumers
• police, courts and prisons were overwhelmed with
  new cases
• organized crime increased in power
• corruption extended among law enforcement
  officials
• The amendment was repealed in 1933 by
  ratification of the 21st Amendment, the only
  instance in US history of repeal of a
  constitutional amendment

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Rule creators

• Rule creators moral crusaders, fervent,
  righteous, often self-righteous
• Mission is to promote their sense of morality -
  thereby defining and combating deviance - for the
  presumed good of others
• Chief concern is the ends - persuasion of others
  - not the means by which persuasion is achieved
• Successful moral crusades are generally dominated
  by those in the upper social strata of society
• They must build public awareness of a problem,
  and have power, public support, and a clear and
  acceptable solution to the problem
• ? tend to have strange bedfellows, e.g.,
• overlap cooperation among Temperance,
  Abolitionist, Womens Rights, and anti-Child
  Labor movements in the late-19th, early 20th
  centuries
• alliance formation among conservative Christian
  activists and Feminists in recent campaigns
  against human trafficking

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Rule enforcers

• Successful crusades produce new sets of rules
  enforcement agents/agencies, thus
  institutionalizing the crusade
• Rule enforcers, e.g., police, are compelled by
  two drives
• the need to justify their own role
• the need to win respect in interactions
• They are in a bind if they show too much
  effectiveness one might say they are not needed,
  and if they show too little effectiveness one
  might say they are failing
• Rule enforcers feel the need to enforce the rule
  because that is their job they are not really
  concerned with the content of the rule
• As rules are changed, something that was once
  acceptable may now be punished and vice versa
• ? Such officials tend to take a pessimistic view
  of human nature due to constant exposure to
  willful deviance

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Selective enforcement

• a good deal of enforcement activity is devoted
  not to the actual enforcement of rules, but to
  coercing respect from the people the enforcer
  deals with
• people may be labeled deviant not due to breaking
  a rule but showing disrespect

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Selective enforcement (contd)

• Whether a person who commits a deviant act is in
  fact labeled a deviant depends on things besides
  his actual behavior
• whether official feels pressure at the time to
  justify his/her position
• whether respect is shown to enforcer
• whether the fix is in
• amateurs tend to be caught, convicted, and
  labeled deviant much more than professionals (who
  know the fixer)
• whether the kind of act committed is high on
  enforcers priority list

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Symbolic Crusade

• From Joseph R. Gusfield Symbolic Crusade
  (Urbana-Champaign University of IlIinois Press,
  1963)

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In US, conflicts tend to be organized along
cultural lines

• US lacked the class divisions conflict found in
  Europe
• ? relative consensus on fundamental economic
  matters
• ? differences between ethnic groups, cultures,
  and religious organizations assume greater
  importance
• "...agreement on fundamentals will permit almost
  every kind of social conflict, tension and
  difference to find political expression."
  (Benson, op. cit., p. 275)

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Moral reform as a political social issue

• Moral reforms are efforts by moral people to
  correct the behavior of the immoral people
• Moral reforms a way cultural groups act to
  preserve, defend, or enhance the dominance and
  prestige of their own ways of life
• Moral reform is a disinterested reform,
  divorced from any direct economic interests

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The Temperance movement

• In Temperance, (moral) abstainers sought to
  correct the behavior of (immoral) drinkers
• Since drinking and nondrinking have been ways to
  identify the members of a subculture, drinking
  and abstinence became symbols of social status
• Temperance was one way in which a declining
  social elite New England WASPs (White
  Anglo-Saxon Protestants) tried to retain its
  social power leadership
• During the 1820's, the men who founded the
  Temperance movement sought to make Americans into
  a clean, sober, godly, and decorous people whose
  aspirations and style of living would reflect the
  moral leadership of New England Federalism

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Temperance goes national

• Starting in the1830s, abstinence becomes a part
  of public morality, a symbol of middle-class
  membership and a necessity for social mobility
• Abstinence is highly symbolic, seen as
  separating
• the industrious from the deadbeat
• the steady worker from the unreliable drifter
• the good credit risk from the bad gamble
• the native American (i.e., US-born) from the
  immigrant

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Assimilative vs coercive reform

• Temperance featured two types of disinterested
  reform
• assimilative reform seeks to assimilate drinkers
  (largely identified with the poor, the alien, and
  the downtrodden) into the social system, to
  follow the reformer's habits and lift selves to
  middle-class respect and income
• coercive reform since the dominance of his
  culture and the social status of his group are
  denied, the coercive reformer turns to law and
  force as ways to affirm it

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19th-century vs 20th-century America

• Abstinence was in in the 19th century, out in
  the 20th
• Local culture of small-town America is
  increasingly challenged by the rise of a
  nationalized culture and an industrial economy of
  mass organizations
• In the shift from commercial to industrial
  society, values of self-control, impulse
  renunciation, discipline, and sobriety decline in
  importance
• Interest in interpersonal relations and
  conspicuous consumption replaces interest in work
  and morality

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Prohibition

• The Eighteenth Amendment was the high point of
  the struggle to assert the public dominance of
  old middle-class values. It established the
  victory of Protestant over Catholic, rural over
  urban, tradition over modernity, the middle class
  over both the lower and the upper strata

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Culture wars then now

• There has been a decline in the social status of
  the old middle class and in the dominance of his
  values. This sense of anger at the loss of status
  and bitterness about lowered self-esteem pervades
  the entire Temperance movement today.
• Temperance has been one of the classic issues on
  which divergent cultures have faced each other in
  America. Such issues of style have been
  significant because they have been ways through
  which groups have tried to handle the problems
  which have been important to them.
• What about today? What issues are important to
  todays declining class?