 CHICAGO PERSPECTIVE
Why name the Perspective Chicago?
- The Chicago School needed answer for its exponentially
growing problem of delinquency and crime. Thus, this became
a primary focus in the city of Chicago.
Chicago Perspective
- By Clifford Shaw and Henry D. Mckay
- Also known as Social Disorganization Theory
- This perspective claimed that delinquency was not caused at
the individual level, but was considered to be normal response
of normal individual to abnormal social conditions.
- There was an indirect loss in the ability to act communally and
individuals exhibited unrestricted freedom to express their
dispositions and desires, often resulting in delinquent
behaviors.
Social Disorganization Theory
- This is the consequences of a community’s inability to realize
common values and to solve the problems of its resident ,
resulting in the breakdown of effective social control within
that community,
Shaw and McKay noted that neighborhoods with highest crime rates
have at least three (3) common problems:
1. Physical Dilapidation
2. Poverty
3. Higher level of ethnic and culture mixing
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Critical Perspective
- Holds the study of the political process is central to
understanding deviance and social and notrol, this
emphasizes the role of elites and historical change.
- The critical perspective in deviance and social control is a
blend of three approaches: societal reaction theory, radical
criminology, and critical sociology.
Societal Reaction Theory
- People are not born “deviant”, whatever their physical, mental,
and moral characteristics.
- The social definitions and systematic ways society punishes
and excludes those it defines as “different” marks such
individuals and group as outsiders.
- This approach focuses attention on the sources of official
labeling (in society, organizations, or small groups) and the
consequences of labeling for deviant and society.
- It urges sociologist to take the side of oppressed persons and
groups, who are seen as needing the protection of the law
against a discriminatory welfare and justice system.
- It sometimes views state officials who “manufacture” and
“process” deviants as more culpable than the deviants they
punish
- It’s perspective toward social control is that regulatory
institutions and organizations engage in excessive
deviantizing.
- It urges there is an “over production” of deviant categories and
persons (Spitzer) and an overuse of the criminal sanction
(packer)
Radical Criminology
- Radical criminology goes beyond societal reaction theory by
identifying the political economy as the source of criminal law
deviant labeling.
- Radical criminologists have shown how political and economic
institutions have increasingly become fused into a single
power system.
- Radical criminology also emphasizes race, class, ethnic, age,
gender, and other significant social differences in the
deviantizing process.
- It sees juvenile delinquency as a special case of status based
on age grading.
- Punishment focuses on minorities, and on children of the poor
and of single mothers.
Critical Sociology
- Critical Sociology is an approach to sociology that examines
society and seeks to change it.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL
 Critical Sociology traces its tradition to Frankfurt school
in Germany.
 As early as 1920s, a group of scholars gathered to
address what they perceived as the major trends and
dislocations in modern life.
 The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars known
for developing critical theory and popularizing the
dialectical method of learning by interrogating society’s
contradictions.
 Taking society as the unit of study, they raised
intriguing questions about the nature of authority and
power, and how these shaped social institutions and
organizations as well as personal sentiments (Arato &
Gebhardt)
 Their approach was twofold. First, they emphasized
changes in legal political, and economic onstituions.
Second, they examined social attitudes toward
prejudice and discrimination, and the problems of
values in mass culture.
 One criticism of the Frankfurt school was its tendency
toward simplistic or unitary explanations, where a
single cause is claimed to be the source of social
disruption. In these analyses society becomes all
powerful and the autonomy of the individual
disappears.
Marxian Influences
- Critical theorists have honored Marxist theory for its analysis
of early, entrepreneurial capitalism. However, they questioned
Marxism’s application to today’s society, which they call
advanced capitalism.
- Marx and Engels emphasized that ideology was embedded in
all social institutions, or organizational doctrines, and human
sentiments. But their approach had been too deterministic.
- Critical Sociologists, by contrast, consider the conditions
under which oppressed groups either comply or revolt. In
considering how power elites stabilize and maintain
themselves, critical thinkers discovered the role of cooptation.
This process is the integration of political minorities into the
leadership or policy-making structure without essentially
altering the system.