labelling
labelling, labelling theoryLabelling theory was a major thrust of the sceptical revolution in the sociology of deviance during the 1950s and 1960s. The orthodox criminology of the immediate post-war period, both in Britain and America, treated a crime or act of deviance as an unambiguous occurrence which could readily be explained as a product of individual psychology or (even) genetic inheritance. Crimes were committed by criminal types—people with particular psychogenetic attributes or socio-cultural backgrounds.
This positivist tradition was challenged by members of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (in the United States) and the National Deviance Conference (in the United Kingdom), who argued that the established criminology was biased because it favoured authoritative definitions of...
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