ACCOUNTING FOR DEVIANCE*

Gordon Marshall — University of Essex

Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and

effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities.
There are good reasons why students of deviance in particular should be in-
terested in what can be learned from their subjects' explanations of their social
practices. Actors are normally called to account for or to explain their
activities precisely when these actions are seen by significant others to be in
some sense "unreasonable". Moreover, accounts are central to the processes
of law. The purpose of legal judgements is to attribute or withold respons-
ibility. In order to assess an individual's guilt, where criminal activities are
concerned, lawyers, judges, and juries pose such questions as: "Did the de-
fendant perform an illegal act?"; "if so, can he or she explain his or her
actions in reasonable terms?"; "Was the act in question pre-meditated?" (that
is, "motivated"); and, perhaps most important of all "What is the relation-
ship between the accused's account of his or her involvement in an act, and
their real involvement?"

Such interest in the mechanisms by which deviants generate and offer

accounts of their activities to themselves and to different groups of significant
others, and in the utility of these accounts in facilitating explanations of
crime and deviance, can be seen to reflect the current fashion for studies in
what might be termed "the sociology of language". The implications for soc-
ial theory of the general conclusions arrived at by certain post-Wittgensteinian
philosophers have led to the discovery (some say rediscovery) of the sociolo-
gical implications of language, and the impact of this new awareness of the
significance of language can be seen in fields as diverse as the sociologies of
education, religion, and the family. 1 However, the debate about language as
a whole and the role of accounts in particular seems to have entered the
sociology of deviance in three ways: first, and primarily, through the modified
Weberianism of C. Wright Mills; secondly, through the writings of a number
of what I shall refer to (for want of a better label) as "interactionists," in par-
ticular the "dramatists" Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman; and, most
recently, in the form of an ethnomethodological critique of constructivist
attempts to explain deviant activities. 2 This tri-partite schema is heuristic in
intent and it is clear from the literature that these categories are by no means

17
mutually exclusive. Certain authors, for example, claim to have been in-
spired by all three traditions, while others have sought explicitly to combine
elements from each in an attempt to provide a more systematic statement of
the general nature of the accounting procedures employed by various groups
of deviants.3 Nevertheless, the three broad perspectives — neo-Weberian,
interactionist, and ethnomethodological — are readily discernible in the
literature and, more important from our point of view, a comparison of the
characteristic features of each points to an important conclusion concerning
the nature of both internal (deviants') and external (lay and sociological)
accounts of deviance, but one which has yet to be stated explicitly by the
deviancy theorists themselves. More specifically, it will be argued in this
paper that certain of the implications of research conducted within the
ethnomethodological and interactionist frameworks suggest that the respec-
tive agendas of all three perspectives may be misconceived, as far as the study
of accounts is concerned. Indeed, it is my contention that because of the
way in which the problems of accounts in studies of deviance, and of account-
ing for deviance (that is, offering sociological explanations of it) have been
construed, an important feature of such accounts — indeed of deviance itself
— has been obscured, namely, that these accounts are, and in a plural society
must be, essentially contested. What is intended by "essentially contested",
and the implications of this for the study of deviance will, it is hoped, become
clear in the course of the argument. Before proceeding to spell these out,
however, a brief outline of the three perspectives on accounts in the sociology
of deviance is in order.

C. Wright Mills and Vocabularies of Motive

The principal framework within which studies of deviants' accounts of their
activities have been located originates in Mills' classic papers on "Language,
Logic and Culture" (1939), "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive"
(1940), and "The Sociology of Motivation" (1953). (The last of these was
written jointly with Hans Gerth). Mills' argument is deceptively simple. He
sets himself the task of outlining a sociology of motivation and of distinguish-
ing this clearly from the more usual biological and psychological approaches
to the subject. Motives, within the perspectives of the latter disciplines, are
conventionally viewed as "internal states" or "drives" pushing the individual
towards a given action. From this point of view the verbal statements that
an actor may offer by way of accounting for his or her behaviour are con-
ceived to be ex post facto justifications ("mere rationalisations") for behaviour,
the real motive for which lies elsewhere. Mills, rather courageously, argues
that the whole idea of "internal motives" is fundamentally erroneous and that

18
 a sociological view of motivation provides the only valid approach to the prob-
lem. A verbal account of motives, Mills maintains, is not a matter of ex post
facto subterfuge, a linguistic device employed by the actor in order to rational-
ise after the event. Precisely what is important about social action is the fact
that it involves other actors who, like the initiating agent, interpret and attri-
bute meaning to the action. For this reason actors think about prospective
action in terms of its reasonableness to significant others. This view of moti-
vation has clear Weberian roots which Mills acknowledges:
Sociologically, as Max Weber put it, a motive is a term in a vocabulary which
appears to the actor himself and/or to the observer to be an adequate reason for
his conduct. This conception grasps the intrinsically social character of motiva-
tion: a satisfactory or adequate motive is one that satisfies those who question
some act or program, whether the actor questions his own or another's
conduct.4
As Mills points out, actors query their ability to offer reasonable accounts of
their actions before they act, so that the decision to act itself may be wholly
or in part dependent on the perceived availability to the actor of a socially
acceptable vocabulary of motives which is appropriate to (makes "reasonable"
or legitimises) his or her conduct. At this point Mills makes the crucial
observation that such vocabularies of motive are socially located. The words
which function as "adequate motives" are "limited to the vocabulary of
motives acceptable for given situations by given social circles" (my emphasis). 5
This observation provides the key to the essentially contested nature of
accounts about deviance and I shall return to it below.

From even this bare outline of Mills' argument we can see that his concept
of "vocabularies of motive" raises two issues that are at the crux of the sub-
sequent debate within the Weberian tradition of motivational theory. These
concern, first of all, the relationship between the causes of an act and the
actor's motives in performing it; and, secondly, the relationship between an
actor's expressed motive for acting (his or her reason) and the real reason
for which he or she acted (the reason). More pointedly, "In what sense are
motives causes of action?"; and "How true are actors' accounts of their
motives for acting?" I shall argue that, at least in so far as any discussion of
deviance is concerned, these questions are inseparably linked, although de-
viancy theorists have not always treated them together. Mills himself add-
ressed both these issues squarely. His treatment of them is important and
must be considered in some detail because the implications of his argument
have clearly not been appreciated by theorists working within the "vocabu-
laries of motives" tradition. It must, however, be conceded that Mills' pre-

19
s e n t a t i o n is b y n o m e a n s u n a m b i g u o u s a n d , as we shall see b e l o w , Mills
oscillates confusingly b e t w e e n certain relativistic tendencies i n h e r e n t in his
a r g u m e n t and a more simplistic and positivistic view o f social action a n d its
explanation.

Mills maintains, at t h e o u t s e t , t h a t t o conceive o f motives as " a c c e p t a b l e

justifications for present, future, or past p r o g r a m s o f c o n d u c t " , r a t h e r t h a n
as inner springs t o a c t i o n , does n o t prejudice their causal efficacy: it merely
describes their function in c o n d u c t .

Only by narrowing our view to the point where we can see the isolated indivi-
dual as a closed system, can we treat verbalized motives as "mere justifications".
By examining the social function of motives, we are able to grasp just what
role motives may perform in the social conduct of individuals. We know that
even in purely rational calculations acceptable justifications may play a rather
large role. Thus, we may reason, "If I did this, what could I say? And what
would they then say or do?" Decisions to perform or not to perform a given
act may be wholly or in part set by the socially available answers to such queries.
(My emphasis).6

T o the e x t e n t that motives " s t e e r " c o n d u c t in this way t h e n t h e y effectively

c o n t r o l t h e action o f t h e reasoning actor.

In a very i m p o r t a n t paragraph, h o w e v e r , Mills acknowledges t h a t t h e p r o b -

l e m o f motives and causes is more c o m p l e x t h a n this. He n o t e s :

A man may begin to act for one motive; in the course of this act he may adopt
an auxiliary motive which he will use to explain his act to others who question
it, or whom he feels may question it in the future. The use of this second
motive as an apology does not make it inefficacious as a factor in his conduct.
In such after-the-event explanations we often appeal to an acceptable vocabu-
lary of motives, associated with expectations with which the members of the
situation are in agreement. Accordingly, our statement of motive serves to
integrate social conduct, in that the reasons we give for an act are among the
conditions for its continued performance. By winning allies for our activities
the motives we verbalize may even be controlling conditions for the activity's
successful performance. And by winning social acceptance, such motives often
strengthen our own will to act. For the performance of many roles requires the
agreement of others, and if no reason can be advanced which is acceptable to
these others, such acts may be abandoned. Diplomacy in the choice of motives
thus controls the conduct of the diplomatic actor. Strategic choice of motive
is part of the attempt to motivate the act for the other persons involved in our
conduct. Carefully chosen and publicized motives often resolve social con-
flicts, potential and real, and thus effectively integrate and release social pat-
terns of conduct. 7

T h e m o d e l o f social action underlying this description is sophisticated. It in-

20
corporates the elements both of dynamism and reflexivity. Actors are con-
tinuously self-reflective in their social conduct and this conduct, in turn, is
seen in the context of an ongoing debate between actor and significant others.
Moreover, the social control functions of vocabularies of motive are clearly
identified. Motives — acceptable grounds for social action — are imputed
to our conudct by ourselves and by others. In imputing motive both we and
they draw on the available vocabularies of motive and assess our conduct as
reasonable or otherwise. Vocabularies of motive are learned and internalised
by social actors and, to the extent that they offer socially acceptable grounds
for the conduct in question, they may alter, reinforce, promote or deter it.
Similarly, by attaching certain standardized motives to given types of con-
duct, significant others may promote or inhibit that conduct by naming it
in terms of socially acceptable or unreasonable motives. To use the example
offered by Mills, we can see how the parent controls the behaviour or the child
by imputing motives to its conduct: actions are called "good", "bad",
"greedy", and so forth, and in this way the child learns what is socially
acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Motives, then, are the actor's anti-
cipation of the judgement of others and, at the same time, the means by which
significant others may influence or attempt to influence the activities of that
actor.

Mills goes on to suggest that, viewed in this way, vocabularies of motive

will have histories. What is viewed as acceptable in one era may be frowned
upon in the next. It is no longer reasonable, in the German Federal Repub-
lic, physically to assault Jews simply on the grounds that they are Jews. At
one time, however, a socially acceptable vocabulary of motives in terms of
which such assaults could be justified was readily available. Moreover, just
as motivational vocabularies are historically located, so they are socially lo-
cated. "The choice of a motive which is ascribed to some conduct pattern
reflects the institutional position of the actor and of those who ascribe motives
to him." 8 The repeated questioning of a teacher's conclusions by a public
school boy can be ascribed to "an independent and critical turn of mind".
Among working class children the same phenomenon is usually named im-
pertinence. In other words, the same act can be ascribed to different motives
according to whom, when, and where we are, and who is doing the naming.

Mills' conclusion, in short, is that motives can be and often are causes,
but in a special sense. The motives accompanying conduct may or may not
be the causes of that conduct, since the availability of a socially acceptable
vocabulary of motives may dissuade or encourage the individual to act, having

21
first considered his or her ability to justify that conduct in acceptable motiva-
tional terms. Motives, by their availability, may also promote the continua-
tion of a pattern of social conduct which was initiated for reasons that are al-
together different from those made available by the motivational vocabulary,
or which may not even have been clear to the actor at the outset of the perfor-
mance. Conversely, by naming an act in terms of an unacceptable motive,
significant others may deter the individual from initiating or repeating it.

So, motives may be causes. But how true are the motivational accounts
offered by actors when called upon to explain their behaviour? Mills' argument
implies that the terms in which people articulate their motives tend princi-
pally to be those that are acceptable to others. Does this mean that these state-
ments of motive are deceptive shams which bear no relationship to the "real"
motives of the individual actor? Acceptable vocabularies of motive may con-
trol social conduct but are they a statement of the "real" motive behind it?
Mills answers that, under certain conditions, they may be:

We may assume that the more deeply internalized in the person, and the more
closely integrated with the psychic structure, a vocabulary of motives is, the
greater is the chance that it contains "the real motives". In fact, that is what
"real motives" may be assumed to mean. We must, in order to "test" motives,
therefore, attempt to find out on what level of character structure a given
vocabulary of motives is integrated.

Mills suggests that motivational vocabularies are more likely to be so integrated

the more persistently and consistently they are employed by the individual. In
this way there is a progressively greater probability of their becoming fully
integrated into his or her psychic structure. The possibility for continuous and
widespread use of the same vocabulary of motives among and between indivi-
duals is, for Mills, largely a matter of social and historical contingency. In
societies in which actors play a restricted number of roles, each of which is
translatable into the others, where these roles are broadly similar to the roles
played by other actors, and where roles are transparent to all, then vocabu-
laries of motive tend to become homogenous. One vocabulary may be suffi-
cient for all the roles a person will play and is sufficient to explain one's con-
duct to any and all significant others. Such vocabularies of motive are readily
accepted by others because the actor is known to use them in private as well
as public, with close friends and distant acquaintances alike. Vocabularies of
motive become stable and accepted, are translatable between peers and are
passed on through socialisation to succeeding generations, becoming linked, in
the process,to impulse and emotion. Appearance and reality are one. Such is

22
the case in, for example, the ideal-typed small pre-industrial village.

In the modern industrial metropolis, however, individuals confront a greater

variety of roles and situations which can be more of less private or public.
Conduct and motives become compartmentalised because one cannot articulate
the same motives to one's spouse, neighbour, and a business acquaintance, in
the way that one's pre-industrial village counterparts can to their spouses,
fellow villagers, and workmates. One set of motives — that employed in one's
role as a husband for example — would appear wholly inappropriate if articu-
lated in the context of one's conduct as a business executive. Motives may
indeed be in conflict. Should one, as father, allow one's company to manu-
facture the nuclear weapons which, as businessman, one sees to be the most
profitable investment of the day? Under these circumstances actors may well
have difficulty in locating the motives from which they acted in a particular
situation: love, self-interest, a sense of duty, or whatever.

Whether or not we accept Mills' evolutionism, or his picture of the moti-

vational homogeneity and stability of pre-industrial societies, 10 he has arri-
ved at the same conclusion in respect of the problem of articulating the rela-
tionship between "his or "her" and " t h e " motives as he did in considering
the relationship between motives and causes. Reasoning theoretically, he
cannot avoid the conclusion that in contemporary societies there exists no
generally shared, stable, transparent vocabulary of motives. The numerous
roles that must be taken up and given up by the actor mean that he or she
must be familiar with, able to move between, and ultimately reconcile several
different sets of motives (if only in the sense of permitting oneself simul-
taneously to hold them) belonging to these different roles. Motives are soci-
ally located, distributed, and (in a complex society) therefore variable, and the
reflexive actor is continuously engaged in a dialogue with self and others in
which he or she and they define, select, and articulate the socially available
motives that are deemed to be appropriate to the occasion, the outcome of
this dialogue having a definite effect on the nature of the ensuing social action.

Problems with Mills' Account

Mills' papers on motivational theory are, of course, entirely programmatic and
the empirical justification and development of his promising argument fell to
later commentators. But his legacy to subsequent researchers was not en-
tirely unambiguous. The strengths of Mills' argument, from our point of view,
lie principally in the reflective and dynamic model of social action that under-
lies it. Social action is viewed as an ongoing process in which actors critically

23
reflect on their activities. Moreover, such reflection can and does refer to
past, present, and future activities, and thus necessitates the continuous re-
construction of past as well as present and possible future responses of others
to one's actions. Explanations of conduct — if one is called to account for
it — will be offered situationally; that is, the form and content of these ex-
planations will vary depending on who is performing the act, in what context,
when, with respect to which significant others, and on who is asking for the
account. So, action is continuously reflective and accounts are situationally
located.

There are, however, two important weaknesses in Mills' presentation, both

of which derive largely from his failure to follow through the logic of his own
argument. He asserts that motives are "causes" by dint of their being antece-
dent to the actor committing the act. Since prior assessment of our ability to
justify a projected act to significant others is a "controlling condition" affect-
ing our ability to perform the act, it is appropriate to view vocalised expec-
tations as causes of action. 1 1 But Mills fails to consider possible alternative
functions of motivational rhetoric: after the fact remedying of damage to
self-images for example. 12 Nor does he consider alternative determinants of
action, such as those that arise from social structural conditions and pressures,
and how these might relate to the factor of motivational rhetoric in any causal
explanation. If, as Mills maintains, decisions to act "may be wholly or in
part" set by the availability of an acceptable motivational rhetoric, then what
other factors affect these decisions, and how do these relate to the rhetorical
aspects of the situation? Mills seems to be asking us, as sociologists, simply to
accept the actor's motives (or our perception of the actor's motives) as a
sufficient causal explanation for the behaviour in question. This comes dan-
gerously close to undermining the very nature of the sociological enterprise
which asks us to look for underlying patterns to, and mechanisms affecting the
nature of, social action that may well be unknown to actors themselves. The
problems associated with assessing the relative importance of the various
"structural" and "motivational" determinants and causes of action are simply
glossed over in Mills' account.

Similarly, and with reference to the problem of the ultimate validity of

articulated motives, Mills refuses to accept the relativistic implications of his
situational locating of accounts. It will be remembered that Mills commences
his argument by challenging the psycho-biological view of motives as internal
states. In "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive" he presents a sus-
tained argument against those who view actors' verbalisations as "mere justi-

24
fications" that offer us only an opportunity to infer the "real motives" that
prompt social action. Mills asks:
. . . what could we possible so infer? Of precisely what is verbalization sympto-
matic? We cannot infer physiological processes from lingual phenomena. All
we can offer and empirically check is another verbalization of the agent's which
we believe was orienting and controlling behaviour at the time the act was per-
formed. The only social items that can "lie deeper" are other lingual forms.
The "Real Attitude or Motive" is not something different in kind from the
verbalization of the "opinion". They turn out to be only relatively and tem-
porally different.13

In other words, since we cannot infer physiological states from linguistic

phenomena we ought to restrict ourselves to the study of the verbalizations
offered by the actor. These verbalizations are not to be investigated in a
futile attempt to discover an "inner spring to action" within the individual,
but in order to record the vocabularies of motive that are typically employed
by certain types of actors in given situations. Vocabularies of motive are situ-
ationally and historically located, are typically used by certain types of actors
in characteristic situations and, as such, become articulated into more or less
coherent ideologies, the history of which can be charted and perhaps related
to the changing situations of the groups and institutions to which they are
anchored.

However, this concern for studying the social distribution, history, and
efficacy of motives is overshadowed in "The Sociology of Motivation" by
Mills' extended commentary on "real motives". His attempt to define these
in terms of the degree of integration of the verbal utterance into the psyche
of the individual not only points to a conventional view of "motive" as indi-
vidually located (motive as someone's state of mind) rather than situationally
located (motive as social efficaciousness), but implies that there is a gap be-
tween verbal utterances and real motives which characterises conduct in mod-
ern societies, a gap that did not exist in the open villages characteristic of our
pre-industrial past. Moreover, Mills offers no suggestions as to how we are to
bridge this gap in the present, other than the argument that individuals possess
motives which influence their conduct although they themselves may be un-
aware of these until "regular techniques" which are capable of detecting the
lie or sham (psychoanalysis, hypnosis, sustained interrogation, moments of
emotional intensity) are brought to bear. Acts that are in reality governed
by "tabooed motives", "impulses", and "emotions" are, according to Mills,
talked about in other terms. The tabooed feelings and impulses are repressed
to the point of being unconscious, and remain undiscovered by the individual

25
within others or within oneself, emerging only through the application of
the above '"techniques":
When we are motivated by impulses that are disapproved, we sometimes cannot
stand the image of ourselves, and so we keep these motives out of our awareness.
Various impulses which we thus "repress" pop up in our daydreams, or in our
dreams at night. But we do not face them when we are alert; the mechanisms of
awareness exclude them in the interests of self-security; they catch us only when
we are alone and our level of consciousness is lowered.14

Real motives may not be articulated: "his" or "her" motives may not be " t h e "
motives. We must therefore develop the "regular techniques" appropriate to
determining the gap between the two. But something seems to have gone
wrong with Mills' argument here. Was not his first intention to challenge pre-
cisely this view of motivation?

In short, Mills' papers on the sociology of motivation raise two important

issues of sociological theory, although Mills himself offers little or no guidance
as to how we might approach either of these. Despite the fact that his argu-
ment is an explicit attack on the varieties of psychological determinism, approaches
that conceive of motives as drives or states which are internal to the individual,
Mills cannot quite exorcise the ghost of Freud and ultimately he leaves the
question of the relationship between "real" and "articulated" motives entirely
unresolved. Furthermore, even if one suspends judgement on the question of
the authenticity of motivational accounts, one must still address the problem
of specifying the relationship between motivational elements and those other
factors (such as "class interests" or "social forces") which are normally adduced
when preferring explanations of social action. While Mills' argument about the
aetiological qualities of vocabularies of motive represents a necessary correc-
tive to excessively deterministic Durkheimian or Marxist approaches, his failure
to consider explicitly the role of possible structural influences on conduct takes
his argument perilously close to an unsatisfactory idealism.

The Vocabulary of Motives Tradition

It is my contention that subsequent research within the tradition established
by Mills has added little or nothing to his original formulation, for it has not
attempted to develop the positive aspects of Mills' argument (principally his dyn-
amic and reflective model of social action), and has conspicuously failed to
address the ambiguities in the argument surrounding the two central issues men-
tioned above: "In what sense are motives causes?"; and "What is the relation-
ship between 'the' reasons and 'his' or 'her' reasons?"

26
 Most researchers have, in fact, been content simply to provide an empirical
basis for Mills' claim that deviants rehearse accounts of their activities prior to
committing the act, relocating it in the process so that it becomes "legitimate"
or "justified", and in this way enabling themselves to commit acts of deviance
without simultaneously redefining themselves as "criminals". Donald Cressey,
for example, in his study of embezzling discovered a number of fairly standard
"rationalisations" which were articulated and assimilated by embezzlers be-
fore committing their act of as he calls it, "trust violation". These rationalis-
ations sanctioned the crime and enabled the embezzler to commit it without
recognising his or her deviance. By employing definitions such as "My intent
is only to use the money temporarily so I am 'borrowing', not 'stealing' ", and
"I have been trying to live an honest life but I have had nothing but troubles
so "to hell with it' ", individuals reconciled their criminal act with their other-
wise non-criminal values. 15 Similarly, in Sykes and Matza's famous paper on
"techniques of neutralisation" (a label that deliberately avoids the ex post
facto connotations of Cressy's "rationalisations"), the authors distinguish five
ways in which delinquents attempt to convince themselves that they are within
the law and justified, and argue that this reconciles their occasional criminal
acts with their otherwise non-criminal values. By "neutralising" the deviant
behaviour before the act they justify it and make it possible. The now well-
known techniques outlined by Sykes and Matza include those of denying res-
ponsibility (the delinquent sees himself as a victim of circumstances in which
any other reasonable person would have done the same thing); denying the
victim (the victims got only what they somehow deserved); denying injury
(the act harmed no-one); condemning the condemners (in various ways those
doing the accusing are worse than the deviant himself); and appealling to
higher loyalties (the act was necessary in order to help a close relative in need). 1 6
Further empirical studies have suggested that pederasts, professional fences,
professional thieves, prostitutes, and suicides, among others, all employ some
sort of antecedent vocabulary of "adjustment/motive/neutralisation" which
disavows the deviance in the deviant's eyes and in this way enables him or her
to integrate acts into an otherwise "normal" pattern of social activities. 17

A number of researchers have in fact extended Mills' argument by develop-

ing some of his suggestions regarding the ways in which vocabularies of motive
are learned by those who subsequently become deviants; how criminal sub-
cultures may reinforce these vocabularies; how certain types of account are
related to certain milieux and sub-cultures; and how these "harden-up" into
more or less coherent ideologies which are then readily available in order to
provide "alternative definitions of the situation" and in this way license

27
"deviant" acts in the eyes of the deviants themselves. 18

In themselves, however, such studies amount to little more than empirical

footnotes to Mills' original papers, for on each occasion on which aetiological
issues have been raised these, following Mills' own procedure, have been side-
stepped, glossed over, or otherwise left outstanding. This is achieved, for
example, by translating the original question — "Why do these people commit
these acts of deviance?" — into "How can these people possibly commit
these acts of deviance?", during the course of the investigation in question.
The assumption is that by explicating the "vocabularies of motive" that "per-
m i t " the act one is expounding fully its causes. This is, of course, merely to
follow Mills. In several recent studies aetiological questions have simply not
been posed. We are, instead, offered detailed descriptions of how "deviance
disavowal" works, presumably on the assumption that this provides, self-
evidently, adequate and sufficient explanation of the deviance in question. 19
Somewhat more explicit is the procedure of those who, like Brian Taylor in
his study of pederasts argue that the availability of an appropriate vocabulary
of motives or technique of neutralisation constitutes one "condition" which
"enables" deviant acts to take place (although, again, to adopt this stance is
to refuse to take the argument beyond the point reached by Mills).20 Cressey,
among others, also follows Mills by arguing that this "enabling" characteristic
grants to vocabularies of motive a clear "causal" status, but Cressey maintains
that this is true also of the structural "problem-situations" which prompt or
create the need for deviant activities in the first place — such as shortage of badly
needed cash prompting embezzlement or prostitution. 21 Similarly, in his
recent study of fiddling among bread-salesmen Jason Ditton notes that "For
good organisational reasons, bread roundsmen at the Wellbread bakery "fiddle"
their customers', and he then provides an elaborate typology of the different
types of accounts which "permit" the fiddling to take place. "Alibis','
according to Ditton, are accounts that are publicly proclaimed to neutralise
blame, whereas "aliases" are those which are privately generated to neutralise
possible feelings of shame. The possible relationships between the "good
organisational reasons" and the "alibis and aliases" are nowhere made clear. 22
The latter are, in Mills' sense, clearly describable as "motives": but what is
their aetiological status relative to the "organisational reasons" (or in Cressy's
terms "problem-situations") which are also in evidence?

In short, much of the research conducted under the rubric of motivational

theory has simply restated the problems of aetiology which Mills posed but
failed to transcend in his original papers. This has, indeed, become apparent

28
to several of the contributors themselves. For example, inquiring into the
different functions performed by murderers' confessions of guilt, Hepworth
and Turner concluded that
Although contemporary theories of accounts and motives are clearly impor-
tant for future criminological theory and research, the notion of "accounts"
needs considerable refinement and elaboration . . . There are many reasons
why we give accounts, many types of accounts and many conditions on
which they are accepted.

Laurie Taylor, in a recent review of the literature, points to several sources of

difficulty in Mills' formulation including (as was noted above) his tendency
towards psychological regressionism in the quest for a definition of "real" as
distinct from "situationally efficacious" motives. Especially interesting is
Taylor's conclusion that the debate about "motivational theory" in deviancy
studies might be advanced by taking up and developing Mills' suggestions
about the social distribution of vocabularies of motive rather than by offering
repetitions examples of the use of "techniques of neutralisation" and the in-
ternal mechanisms of how these operate. 24 It is precisely the former aspect
of Mills' argument — an analysis of the nature and workings of situational
rhetoric — that has been to the fore in studies of accounting procedures con-
ducted by sociologists working within the ethnomethodological and interac-
tionist perspectives.

Ethnomethodology and Interactionism 25

While there is much in the ethnomethodological programme with which one
might wish to disagree,26 it is fair to say that, in so far as they have been con-
cerned to study the nature of accounting procedures in general, ethnomethod-
ologists have fastened on to precisely that dimension of Mills' argument which
theorists working within the "vocabularies of motive" tradition are now com-
ing to realise they have neglected. The ethnomethodological notions of the
indexicality of all accounts, of the existence of shared background assumptions
regarding verbal and non-verbal practices, and of implicitly understood rules
of reasonableness regarding social activities (including accounting procedures),
offer a constant reminder of the social context of accounting. For the ethno-
methodologist, all accounts are situationally located. As Garfinkel reminds us,
accounts become "reasonable" and are seen to provide acceptable grounds on
which social action might proceed through a process of negotiation between
actor and "significant others" (actual or hypothesised). 2 7 Motives are a
socially negotiated construct. In the parlance of Blum and McHugh, they
"are not states belonging to persons but are an observer's method for gener-

29
ating the idea of persons." Since motives, indeed meanings in general, are
always "situated", they cannot be understood (by lay members or sociolo-
gists) through any procedure which involves abstracting the actors from the
concrete instances of social action in which they are involved.28 Researchers
inquiring into the nature of "accounting procedures" in deviance from an
ethnomethodological standpoint have, therefore, emphasised that motivational
accounts of deviance are situated. Offenders and probation officers, for ex-
ample, have separate standards for what constitutes a "reasonable account"
of the offender's act. Reasoning from their own assumptions and background
expectancies, probation officers will select from offenders' accounts of "why
they did it" those aspects which can be reconciled with their own theories
and stereotypes about deviant motivation and behaviour, until they arrive at
what seems to them to be a "reasonable account" of that deviant action. 2 9
Acts of deviance are thus made intelligible by being translated into categories
deriving from what the probation officer "knows" about deviant behaviour
in general. The probation officer's "reasonable account" of the offender's
behaviour makes sense of that behaviour though it need not necessarily lend
approval to it.

While emphasising the situational location of accounts, however, ethno-

methodologists have been content to restrict themselves to repeated demon-
strations of how the content of actors' accounts is related to the context in
which these accounts are offered and to a detailed description of the rules
by which utterances are heard and built up into meaningful interpretations of
the other's intentions and actions. 3 0 As critics have pointed out, the adoption
of such a strict "analytical" approach to accounting procedures begs the whole
question of causation. The relationship between the enterprises of explaining
why people act in such a manner, and describing and explaining how they talk
about so acting, is no clearer in the traditions deriving from the writings of
Garfinkel or Blum and McHugh than it is in that originating in Mills' version
of motivational theory. Horeover, the overt aim of most ethnomethodolo-
gists being to repair the indexicality of verbalisations by locating them in a
context of hitherto implicit background assumptions, one cannot help but
conclude that they have "solved" the problem of the indexicality of the
ethnomethodological account of deviance by fiat. Having laid bare the
"taken-for-granted" background of the accounts offered by both deviant and
lay observer, ethnomethodologists then maintain that their own account of
deviant practices represents a more complete explanation which is "true" —
or at least "more true" than those offered by other social actors. But the
unsatisfactory means by which ethnomethodologists attempt to reconcile

30
the relativistic premises of their general theory with a positivistic
stance on the question of the "objectivity" or non-relativistic status of their
own accounts, namely, by insisting on the concrete irreducibility of shared
background rules and generally held assumptions, has been extensively criti-
cised elsewhere, and I do not propose to pursue this well-trodden path here. 3 1

A number of interactionists, focussing their attentions on the verbal per-

formances which accompany deviant acts, have fulfilled a similar function to
that performed by ethnomethodology in reminding us of the social structural
aspects of the offering and interpreting of accounts. Besides documenting
the mechanisms of accounting, such as those involved in remedial interchanges,32
Goffman reminds us that accounts have a social distribution and currency.
The same motivational account can be accepted or rejected depending on who
is offering the account, to whom, and under what circumstances. The "sad
stories" offered by inmates of mental asylums, for example, by which inmates
explain their current incarceration while preserving their sense of moral
worth, are invariably "accepted" by fellow patients though entirely "rejected"
by staff. 33 ("Acceptance" and "rejection" are, of course, problematic notions
in this context and this issue will be taken up below.) Interactionists research-
ing the nature of the deviant's version of events have stressed the connections
between motivational accounts and social context including, for example, the
way in which certain motivational vocabularies are learned by participation
and socialisation into certain milieux and how this generates often conflicting
motivational models held by deviants and by those outside the deviant sub-
culture. 34

The last-mentioned realisation opens the way, of course, to one of the

major developments in deviancy theory during recent years, namely, so-called
"labelling theory". Developing out of the interactionist arguments that in-
dividuals learn how to become deviant and how to practise deviance, and that
this learning is affected by the responses of others to the extent that initiates
are socialised into accepting sub-cultural models of their activities which sanc-
tion them, models that are rejected by the society at large, the nub of labell-
ing theory is stated succinctly in Howard Becker's famous definition of the
deviant as "one to whom that label has been successfully applied". Deviant
behaviour is then "behaviour that people so label". 35

Now, the literature on labelling theory is extensive and some of the more
extreme claims of labelling theorists, as well as their description of the labell-
ing process, have been subjected to sustained criticism. 36 However, irrespective

31
of the merits or otherwise of these criticisms, the labelling perspective points
to a conclusion which is implicit in Becker's definition of the deviant, namely,
that deviance is what I wish to call an "essentially contested concept". For
this reason, I shall argue, accounts of deviance — whether offered by the actor
himself or herself, by lay members, law enforcement agents or sociologists —
are also inherently contestable. This argument, if valid, implies a radical
shift in the way in which studies of deviance are conducted. Instead of posing
the questions "Are his reasons for acting the reasons?" and "Are the reasons a
sufficient causal explanation for his action?" we ought to be asking "On what
grounds are we prepared to accept or reject his version of events?" A social-
scientific debate about the real ("true") "causes" of deviance becomes a poli-
tical discussion about the distribution of power in society. Who says who
are deviants, and on what grounds? The central question is not "Whose ex-
planation of deviance, whose account, is true?", but rather "Whose account is
seen as reasonable and is believed, and why?"

Motivational Accounts of Deviance as Essentially Contested

The most important point about labelling theory, from our point of view, is
that it grasps the evaluative aspects of the concept of deviance. Deviance is
necessarily deviance from something. From what? From someone else's
view of what is legitimate, proper, and reasonable. The concept of deviance,
in other words, necessarily arises out of a particular moral framework. It is
ineradicably value-dependent. W. B. Gallie has pointed to the existence of con-
cepts whose application is inherently a matter of contention, and he charac-
terises such "essentially contested concepts" as inevitably involving "endless
disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users". It seems to me
that "deviance" is such a concept because, in the terms of Gallie's argument,
its definition and use are inextricably tied to a given set of value-assumptions
which predetermine the range and nature of its empirical application. 37 To
label an act deviant is therefore to engage in a political discussion — not a
scientific one.

When challenged to account for behaviour that is deemed by another to be

deviant, the accused may contest the attribution of the label "deviant" (and
hence the attribution of guilt) in one of a number of ways, depending upon
the values to which he or she subscribes. A defendant may deny that the par-
ticular act in question was deviant; may accept the act as being deviant but
deny any involvement in the act itself; may accept the act to be deviant,
accept involvement in it, but deny any responsibility for his or her actions; or,
finally, may accept the act to be deviant according to the rules which form

32
the status quo, accept both involvement in it and responsibility for such
involvement, but contest the rules themselves. In the first of these strategies
the person accused accepts that all acts of the category " x " are deviant but
denies that the particular act he or she committed falls into this category.
Alternatively, the defendant may agree that the act in question is deviant,
but deny any involvement in it. This second strategy, the declaration "I
didn't do it", may in fact be a screen for either of the remaining two strategies,
since denial of involvement may represent the accused's best line of defence
where he or she cannot offer an alternative motivational account (an accept-
able excuse or justification) to that proposed by the accuser (Strategy 3), or
does not want to be seen to be challenging the existing normative order or
the rules of the state (Strategy 4).

For this reason any attempt to explain deviance, to "account" for it, is
similarly inherently contestable — though such an account may or may not
be contested, depending on who is offering what account to whom, and
under what circumstances. When an account is called for, say, a lawyer calls
on a thief to explain why he robbed a bank, the account proferred may be re-
jected or honoured. To talk of honouring an account is in fact to point to
the moral aspects of the process. The listener hears the account and makes
an assessment of its "reasonableness" but, where deviance is concerned, the
assessment of the "truth" or "falsehood" of the account is necessarily tied to
an attribution of guilt or blame. The accuser feels that certain rules have
been broken. The accused must defend himself or herself against the charge
of breaking these. He or she must offer an account which somehow neutra-
lises the accusation.

So far, this is just as Sykes and Matza maintain. But is the account
offered by the defendant "true" or "false"? Are his or her (stated) reasons
the reasons? Commentators have generally faltered before this hurdle and
offered one of two courses of action. Either they have simply refused to
jump the fence, so to speak; or, more commonly, they have given rein to
their positivistic steeds and charged on regardless, maintaining that his reasons
might or might not be the reasons and that, as good social scientists, it is our
task to discover whether they are not. Let truth prevail.

Once the essentially contested nature of deviance and accounts of deviance

is conceded, however, this course of action can be seen to be futile. The
"scientific" attempt to assess the gap between "his" or "her" and " t h e " reasons
must fail because it rests on an unrealistically simplistic model of social

33
action, and an equally untenable belief that, in the explanation of deviant
acts, the "facts" of "why the deviant act was committed" and the values of
all concerned in reconstructing the facts — defendant, significant others, and
sociologist — can scrupulously be kept apart, the former being laid bare and
the latter being excluded from this process. The very question of the rela-
tionship between "his" or "her" and "the real" motives is symptomatic of
the unsatisfactory mechanical model of social action which underlies the
"motivational theory" tradition after Mills. This model proposes that actors
have one, clear motive in acting, that they act as free agents in pursuit of a single
objective and, having acted, then proceed to pursue a further and separate
but clearly articulated end. This view of social action ignores the dynamic
characteristics of action and the reflective nature of actors. Actors themselves
are aware that vocabularies of motive are socially located and that they cannot
(and in reality clearly do not) offer the same motivational account to all sig-
nificant others, or indeed to themselves. Mills himself argued that each ver-
balization, each account, was a new social act. Actors continually articulate
motives to themselves and to others. They define their present and future
but also reinterpret the past by reconstructing their biography. Accounting
and attribution of motive by reflexive actors is not a "once and for all" pro-
cedure, precisely because social action is an ongoing process. In the course of
an action seqeuence actors may change or reinterpret their motives. Origi-
nal intentions are transcended by subsequent reinterpretations of self and
motive. In this complex, dynamic milieu of continuous reflexivity, of con-
tinuous reinterpretation of the world, self, and the relationship between
them, simply to take a "snapshot" picture of a deviant "act" and then attempt
to read the "real" reasons for the act (the "true" motive) from an account
offered by the deviant, is to miss the point. The distinction between (say) a
thief's stated reasons for committing a robbery and his "real" reasons does
not exist. The thief knows, and knew before committing the act, that he
could not account for his actions to different others in the same terms. To
his accomplice he explains that he is robbing the bank because it is poorly
guarded. With his wife both she and he interpret his actions in terms of their
mutual love, and the thief's desire to share that love in surroundings other
than those of abject poverty. But this "explanation" is not acceptable to the
judge who tries the thief. The latter knows that his action and motives will
seem most "reasonable" (that is, legitimate) to the former when expressed
in terms of the thief's unhappy and unstable childhood, or when the rob-
bery is viewed as a desperate and impulsive act towards which the thief was
"driven". Conversely, the judge does not accept as reasonable those accounts
of robbery which seek to justify or excuse the theft as an expression of a

34
lower-class husband's love for his wife: middle-class law-enforcement agents
deny such a vocabulary to lower-class defendants. Contemplating the robbery
beforehand, in the company of his fellows, the thief expresses his sense of out-
rage at the affluent who, it seems to him, unjustifiably enjoy riches while he
can scarcely afford a decent meal. Now, which of these motivational accounts
is seen as "reasonable" depends on who is doing the seeing. The thief him-
self commits the robbery for all these reasons therefore it cannot be said that
any one of the motivational accounts he offers to the significant others in this
story is any less or more "true" than any other. The thief believes that in
committing the robbery he is acting reasonably: he has good reasons for doing
what he does. But he also knows, as a competent member of society, that the
theft that he has reasoned to himself, his wife, his peers, and his accomplice
to be "reasonable", will not be viewed in this way by others (such as law-
enforcement agencies). A judge might decide he robbed the bank because he
is simply "another troublemaking hoodlum" or may decide to "excuse" the
act in part because the thief was indeed "driven" to it as an act of desperation
after an unhappy childhood (depending on which judge is sitting in judge-
ment). All of this the thief knows: and all of the "motivational accounts"
which he offers are therefore "true".

For this reason to ask the question "What was the thief's real (true) reason
for committing the robbery?" is to commit the twin fallacies of seeing motive
as an "internal state" and verbalisation after the fact as "mere rationalisation".
To explain or account for a deviant act, whether the accounting is done by
the deviant himself or herself, a lay member, or a sociologist, is not to make
a disinterested observation. It is to argue that the act is "reasonable" (justi-
fiable) or "unreasonable" (unjustifiable). To negotiate about the truth status
of deviants', lay, or sociologists' explanations for a particular deviant act is to
conduct a political argument. The defendant offers an account of his or her
situation and motives which make the act in question reasonable in the defen-
dant's own eyes. (One possible account is, of course, to deny one was in any
way motivated and imply one was therefore a "victim of circumstance"). Judge
and jury may refuse to accept the account which is offered to them and suggest
another; or, they may accept the defendant's account but deny that this
makes his or her action "reasonable". Moreover, as was argued at the out-
set, the twin issues of the authenticity of accounts and the aetiology of moti-
vation cannot be separated where deviance is concerned. The sociologist, for
example, may argue that many people in similar circumstances, having had
similar experiences to the accused, commit similar acts, and that these circum-
stances or combination of circumstances therefore "explain" the deviance.

35
The "causes" of deviance are, in other words, "structural" rather than "moti-
vational". But an "explanation" of deviance which takes the form of a more
or less deterministic account in terms of "social forces" or whatever is simply
one more account, an attempt to excuse certain deviant behaviour by recon-
structing its aetiology in non-motivational terms. Such attempts are accepted
or rejected, not according to any scientific criteria, but with respect to cer-
tain moral and political standpoints, for any account of deviance, any attempt
t o explain it as motivated by one set of concerns rather than another, or as
not motivated at all, is simultaneously an attempt to attribute responsibility
and therefore guilt. Where deviance is concerned, explanation and judge-
ment are inexorably intertwined. Deviance as a concept, and accounts of
deviance as explanations for "deviant" activities, are essentially contestable
and where such accounts are offered they will in all probability be contested.

It is therefore irrelevant to pose the question as to whether "his" or "her"

motives are " t h e " motives because, given a realistic model of social action,
these accounts are in principle inseparable. The motives agreed by the judge
and jury cannot, in any sense, provide a more "true" explanation of the de-
viant act than does the defendant's own account of his motives, or the socio-
logist's of his "deviant" behaviour. Rather, the sorts of questions one ought
to be asking should be addressed, not to some futile quest for an "objective",
"true" explanation of deviance, but to the processes by which explanations
of "deviant" behaviour are accepted or rejected. Where an account is called
for by one agent in respect of what he or she sees as a "deviant" act perpetra-
ted by another, how does social interaction proceed? Who decides when an
account offered by a defendant is "reasonable", and on what basis? How is
an agreed version of "motives" and "reasonableness" reached? Or, as is more
likely where deviance is concerned, how does one agent's version of events come
to prevail over another? How is an authoritative definition of reality arrived
at? To ask questions such as these is to pursue the implications of Mills' pro-
ject by recognising the situational location of motives and of what constitutes
an acceptable motivational account. It is to investigate the social control func-
tions of language in a society in which the unequal distribution of material
wealth and resources is maintained by structures of power and formally sanc-
tioned in a codified system of laws. As others have observed:

There is a differential distribution not just of property but also of the right to
be heard and believed. Deviants have violated moral rules and are thus thought
to have forfeited their right to be believed. They are at the bottom of a moral
pyramid. The definitions of judges and police chiefs need not be checked out;
those at the bottom have to be carefully scrutinised for "bias". (My emphases.)39

36
To talk about the truth or falsehood of accounts of deviance (originating in
whatever source) is not to talk about a characteristic that is inherent in these
accounts; it is, rather, to talk about who decides their "truth-status". More
important than the content of the accounts themselves, when it comes to
negotiating the realities of deviance, is the "hierarchy of credibility" within
which these accounts are located.

Conclusion
What are the advantages to looking at accounts of deviance in this way? In
what respects, if any, is the approach here advocated more useful than that
adopted by motivational theorists within the Millsian tradition, by ethnome-
thodologists or interactionists?

It can be argued first of all, that certain hitherto problematic accounting

procedures may be more readily understood when deviance and accounts of
deviance are viewed as "essentially contested". The question of "mixed
motives" offers an example. Precisely because deviants arc socially compe-
tent it is quite rational for them to offer different accounts of their motiva-
tion to different external authorities. They are likely to offer contradictory
versions in court, in the sociological interview, and to their peers. These
motivational accounts are all equally "true". Similarly, the account "I don't
know why I did it ' can be read as "I cannot offer an account of my motives
which you would find reasonable", 4 0 or "In order to preserve my sense of
moral worth and/or to appear reasonable to you I am going to present myself
as a victim of circumstances beyond my control and as having been forced
into the act despite myself", 41 instead of being seen to offer confirmation of
the "irrationality" and "irresponsibility" of the "criminal type". (This kind
of explicit reasoning would hardly be undertaken by the defendant of course,
since an appreciation of these factors would form part of his or her stock of
background awareness and understanding as a socially competent actor.)

Attempts to justify "deviant" activities, to excuse them, 42 or to remain

silent (refusal to provide a justification or excuse), can all be readily under-
stood within the framework of contested conceptions of whether or not these
activities are "reasonable". Even confessions which appear to deny the
"contested" nature of deviance, fit readily into this perspective. Confessions
are normally offered in an attempt to justify either oneself, ones actions, or
both. To accept that what one has done, and why one did it, are "wrong", to
confess, and to seek forgiveness and/or justice, are to attempt to elevate one-
self in the moral order: "Despite what I did, I am a worthy person. Please

37
treat me accordingly." 4 3 To confess, no less than to justify or excuse, is to
attempt to deflect moral censure. One denies a pejorative assessment of either
oneself or one's activities. Success in such attempts depends not so much on
some inherent attribute of the account that is offered, as upon the circum-
stances under which this account is offered. Who is offering the account to
whom and under what situational constraints?

Similarly, by taking up the dynamic and reflexive model of social action

which is implicit in Mills (though submerged in his positivistic search for "the
cause" and "the real reasons" for any action), we can see how it would be
more profitable to investigate the typical usages of motivational vocabularies,
the patterns of and constraints on discourse, than to continue to search for
"the real reasons" underlying deviant activities. If, as seems to be the case, 4 4
deviants can and sometimes do act for one reason, or for reasons which may be
unclear at the time, and in the process of acting learn an account or accounts
which strengthen their will to act, or change the direction or nature of the
action sequence itself, how realistic is it to ask the deviant, or the sociologist,
for a statement of "the real reason" why the deviant act was committed? Focus-
sing our attention on the ways in which motivational accounts are learned,
generated, and accepted or rejected, it would be possible to chart the histories
of motivational vocabularies, the typical circumstances under which they are
used, and how and why, in certain situations, one account of action (with its
implicit motivational theory) comes to prevail over competing accounts of the
same activity. What happens when two conflicting accounts of deviance are
offered? Is it reasonable to assume, as ethnomethodologists do, that accounts
are accepted because they are appropriate in certain situations where they
match common "background expecataions"? As Hepworth and Turner have
pointed out, the ethnomethodological view of "honouring an account" is too
simple:

Since the "honouring of an account" and "background expectancies" are

equivalent, the explanation of why any particular account is accepted tends to
be circular. The only real clue which suggests the existence of common expec-
tancies is the fact that an account has been accepted.

Accounts can be "accepted", however, not only because they match "common
background expectations", but also because the interrogator is not really con-
cerned with whether they are reliable or not, or because the cost of challenging
the account is not worth the possible social disruption which might follow.
Actors may "accept" accounts for pragmatic reasons, and thus permit social
interaction to proceed, while not accepting these accounts in any normative

38
sense. An account may be "mutually accepted" because to a defendant it
represents the most rational account to offer in the circumstances, whereas
to an interrogator it "makes sense" of the suspect's criminal activities in terms
of prevailing theories of deviance.

In plural societies, competing meaning-structures and moralities must be

related to the power structures which underwrite these. 4 6 Certain vocabu-
laries of motive are legitimated and accredited in advance by the status quo,
and the study of which account of deviance prevails in a given situation cannot
be divorced from the study of the power relationships that exist between those
involved in that situation. What Weber omitted from his picture of the "ex-
ternally warring Gods", the irreconcilable values which people might serve, 4 7
was the fact that in this war, never ending though it might be, there are per-
iodic (though in the long run transitory) conquests. The ruling ideas, in any
age, are generally those of the most powerful groups in a society.

Previous commentators have investigated the ways in which individuals

might be influenced, in committing a "crime", by the availability of a suitable
motivational rhetoric. I have argued, instead, that we ought to be looking at
the institutional attachment of accounts, their differential distribution, and
how their usage can be imposed on one social grouping by another. One
possible starting point, in such investigations, might be to examine the ways in
which the differential right to be heard, believed, and excused in certain sit-
uations is related to the distribution of power, property, and prestige. How-
ever, to adopt such a programme is not to abandon aetiological discussion,
since "explanations" of deviance themselves take the form of inherently poli-
tical accounts which make a statement about the "reasonableness" of the be-
haviour in question and allocate responsibility and guilt accordingly.

The nature of sociological accounts of deviance thus changes. By locating

and situating motivational rhetoric the sociologist points to the ways in which
ideologies are generated and reinforced, patterns of behaviour and language
constructed, and the status quo maintained. But sociological explanations of
deviance are no more and no less "true" than those offered by the authorities
or the defendant himself. They are all simultaneously attempts to explain
the social order and to change or (in the case of authority) maintain it. They
are all, ultimately, political.

39
NOTES
* I would like to record my gratitude to Stan Cohen, Howard Newby, and Ken
Plummer for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1 Some of the relevant philosophical discussion can be found in Binkley (1971),
Duncan (1968, 1969), Harre and Secord (1972), and Louch (1966), and for an
overview see Littman (1958). On the sociology of language see Hertzler (1965).
Studies of the role of language in general and of actors' accounts in particular, in
the areas mentioned in the text, include Bernstein (1974), B. Taylor (1976b, 1978).
Beckford (1978), and Speier (1971, 1972).
2 More generally, the radical reorientation of deviancy theory in the mid-sixties was a
move away from approaches that refused to take deviants' own accounts of their
activities at all seriously towards those which advocated studying these accounts as
interesting and valuable data in themselves, and was occasioned largely by a new
generation of theorists (such as David Matza and Jack Douglas) who shared a
phenomenological commitment to placing actors' definitions at the centre of socio-
logical explanation. See Matza (1969) and Douglas (1973).
3 See Klockars (1975: 137), Scott and Lyman (1968, 1970), and B. Taylor (1976b).
4 Gerth and Mills (1970: 116).
5 Ibid Mills' sociological view of motivation represents, of course, a strong challenge
to many approaches in criminology which assume that deviants' accounts are incon-
sequential in any attempt to construct explanations for deviant behaviour.
Theories of deviance which make this assumption include those that view deviance
as the result of some inner push (Lambroso), of conditioned anxiety or uncon-
scious urges (Eysenck, Freud), or of inadequate integration or socialization into the
wider society (the functionalist approach). One this point see L. Taylor (1971,
1972) and, for an excellent overview of theories of motivation in general, Peters
(1963).
6 Gerth and Mills (1970: 116).
7 Ibid., pp. 1 1 6 - 1 7 .
8 Ibid., p. 118.
9 Ibid, p. 120.
10 Several writers have taken up the questions of authenticity and sincerity at a more
philosophical level. The complex history of these concepts in Western thought
cannot be gone into here, but see Sennett (1974) and Trilling (1974).
11 Mills (1974b: 443).
12 On this point see L.Taylor (1979: 155).
13 Mills (1974b: 446).
14 Gerth and Mills (1970: 128).
15 Cressey (1973: 9 3 - 1 3 8 ) .
16 Sykes and Matza (1957).
17 See, for example, McCaghy (1968), Klockers (1975), B. Taylor (1976a), Cohen
(1977), Reiss (1961), Jackman and O'Toole (1963), Jacobs (1967), Ames et al.
(1970).
18 See Bondeson (1968), Polsky (1967: 106 - 16), Rosenberg and Silverstein (1969:
59 - 75), Cressey (1962), Hartung (1965: 53 - 84), Irwin (1970), Irwin and Cressey
(1962).
19 For example see McCaghy (1968), Henry (1976), Box (1971) and Cohen (1977).
Of course certain writers profess a positive commitment to avoiding aetiological

40
 questions in favour of a "naturalistic" or "ethnographic" approach. Phenomenolo-
gists, for reasons deriving from theory, and modern interactionists, on moral and
ethical grounds, share a commitment to "telling it like it is" that leads them away
from issues pertaining to aetiology. See Matza (1969) and Becker (1967).
20 B. Taylor (1976a: 100).
21 See Cressey (1973: 111 - 12), and Reiss (1961: 195).
22 Ditton (1977).
23 Hepworth and Turner (1974: 48).
24 L. Taylor (1979).
25 Although there are other very good reasons for not equating ethnomethodology
and interactionism, certain shared assumptions regarding the situational usage of
language that are significant from our point of view make it legitimate to consider
them together , but compare the exchange between Denzin, Zimmerman, and
Wieder in Douglas (1971).
26 For critical commentaries on ethnomethodology see Goldthorpe (1973) and Att-
well (1974).
27 Garfinkel (1974).
28 McHugh et al. (1974: 7). See also Douglas (1973: 240 - 43) and Wootton (1975).
29 Hardiker and Webb (1979).
30 See, for example, B. Taylor (1976b, 1978), Beckford (1978), and Cicourel (1968).
31 This criticism has been voiced by, among others, Hindess (1973) and I. Taylor et al.
(1973: 1 9 2 - 2 0 8 ) .
32 On these see Goffman (1972).
33 Goffman (1961: 6 6 - 7 ) .
34 See, for example, Irwin (1970), Irwin and Cressey (1962), and for more general
statements Strauss (1969: 49 - 55) and Rose (1962).
35 Becker (1973: 9).
36 For an excellent review of the issues raised by the labelling perspective see Plummer
(1979).
37 Gaillie (1955 - 56).
38 For example, within (broadly) the labelling camp, the possible relationships be-
tween the wielding of power and the outcome of negotiations have been noted by
Scheff (1968). He too maintains that in "negotiating reality", in particular where
the assessment of responsibility is concerned, participants may bring to the bargain-
ing table unequal resources of power that, in turn, enable some actors to control
the agenda of the discussion and possibly, ultimately, influence the outcome of
negotiations such that the attribution of responsibility may be more a function of
the wielding of power than an interpretation which is consonant with "the facts".
Where Scheff's argument and my own diverge is on the question of the possibilities
for transcending the gap between the "power-distorted" outcomes of negotiations
and "the facts" of "what actually happened". Scheff believes that the sociologist
has a privileged epistemological position that grants access to an objective, scientific
assessment of the influence of "techniques of interrogation" on the outcome of
negotiations, a belief that has much in common with the ethnomethodological
"solution" to the problem of the indexicality of ethnomethodological accounts,
but one which I am arguing, at least in so far as the explanation of deviance is con-
cerned, is demonstratably false. Compare also the position of Kenneth Burke, who
concludes that the relationship between the political world and the formation,

41
 articulation, and reception of motivational rhetoric makes "the subject of moti-
vation . . . a philosophical one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical
science" (Burke, 1962b: 623, 1962a: xxv).
39 Cohen (1977: 17), paraphrasing the arguments of Howard S. Becker.
40 Adolescent boys who "store-hop" (shoplift in gangs and discard their gains) steal
largely for fun, and to gain prestige among their peers, but they are aware that they
could hardly offer these in court as acceptable reasons for their behaviour. (cf.
Hartung, 1965: 5 6 - 7 ) . See also Taylor and Walton (1971).
41 See Cressey (1973: 1 2 8 - 3 6 ) .
42 The distinction between accounts which seek to "justify" and those that offer
"excuses" is made by Scott and Lyman (1968).
43 Hepworth and Turner (1974: 36).
44 See Becker (1973).
45 Hepworth and Turner (1974: 46).
46 Scott and Lyman (1970: 107 - 11).
47 Weber (1970: 1 5 2 - 3 ) .

42
REFERENCES
Ames, Richard, G., "Breakfast with Topless Barmaids", in Jack D. Douglas (ed.)
et. al 1970 Observations of Deviance New York: Random House, 35 - 52.
Attwell, P., 1974 "Ethnomethodology Since Garfinkel", Theory and Society, 1,
179 - 210.
Becker, Howard, S., "Whose Side Are We On?", Social Problems, 14, 253 - 47.
1976
Becker, Howard, S., Outsiders, New York: Free Press.
1973.
Beckford, James, A., "Accounting for Conversion", British Journal of Sociology, 29,
1978 249-62.
Bernstein, Basil, Class, Codes and Control: Vol.1: Theoretical Studies Towards
1974 a Sociology of Language, London: R.K.P.
Binkley, Robert Agents, Action, and Reason, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
et. al. 1971
Bondeson, Ulla, 1968 "Argot Knowledge as an Indicator of Criminal Socialization",
Scandinavian Studies in Criminology, 2, 73 - 107.
Box, Steven, 1971 Deviance, Reality and Society, London: Holt, Rinehard and
Winston.
Burke, Kenneth A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, Cleveland:
1962a, b World Publishing.
Cicourel, A. V., The Social Organisation of Juvenile Justice, New York: John
1968 Wiley.
Cohen, Stan, 1977 "Introduction" and "commentary" in Walter Probyn, Angel
Face, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1 1 - 1 7 , 232 - 5 1 .
Cressey, Donald, R., "Role Theory, Differential Association, and Compulsive Crimes"
1962 in Arnold M. Rose (ed.) Human Behaviour and Social Process
London: R.K.P., 443 - 67.
Cressey, Donald, R., Other People's Money Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith
1973
Ditton, Jason, 1977 "Alibis and Aliases: Some Notes On The 'Motives' of Fiddling
Bread Salesmen", Sociology, 11, 233 - 55.
Douglas, Jack, D., Understanding Everyday Life, London: R.K.P.
1971
Douglas, Jack, D., The Social Meaning of Suicide, Princeton: New Jersey: Prince-
1973 ton University Press.
Duncan, Hugh Symbols in Society New York: Oxford University Press.
1968
Duncan, Hugh Symbols and Social Theory, New York: Oxford University
1969 Press.
Gaillie, W. B., 1965-6 "Essentially Contested Concepts", Proceedings of the Aristote-
lian Society, 56, 1 6 7 - 9 8 .
Garfinkel, Harold, "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities", in
1964 David Sudnow, (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction, New York,
Free Press: 1972, 1 - 3 0 .
Gerth, Hans, and Character and social Structure, London, R.K.P.
Mills, and Wright, C.,
1970.

43
 Goffman, Etving, Asylums New York: Doubleday 1972 Relations i n Public
1961 Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goldthorpe, J. H., "A Revolution in Sociology", Sociology, 7, 449 - 62.
1973
Hardiker, Pauleen "Explaining Deviant Behaviour: The Social Context of 'Action'
and Webb, David, and 'Infraction' Accounts in the Probation Service", Sociology,
1979 13, 1-17.
Harré, R, and The Explanation of Social Behaviour Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Secord, P. F., 1972
Hartung, Frank, E Crime, Law and Society, Detroit: Wayne State University
1965 Press.
Henry, Stuart, "Fencing with Accounts: The Language of Moral Bridging",
1976 British Journal of Law and Society, 3, 91 - 100.
Hepworth, Mike,and "Confessing to Murder: Critical Notes on the Sociology of
Turner, Bryan, S., Motivation", British Journal of Law and Society, 1, 31 - 49.
1974
Hertzler, Joyce, O., A Sociology of Language New York: Random House.
1965
Hindess, Barry, 1973 The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology London: Macmillan.
Irwin, John, 1970 The Felon Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Irwin, John and "Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture", Social Problems
Cressey, Donald, R., 10, 142- 55.
1962
Jackman, Normad, "The Self-Image of the Prostitute", Sociological Quarterly, 4,
R., and O'Toole 150-61.
Richard, 1963
Jacobs, Jerry, 1967 "A Phenomenological Study of Suicide Notes". Social Problems,
15, 6 0 - 7 2 .
Klokars, Carl, B., The Professional Fence London: Tavistock.
1975
Littman, Richard, "Motives, Hostory and Causes", The Nebraska Symposium on
A., 1958 Motivation, 6, 114 - 68.
Louch, A. R., 1966 Explanation and Human Action Oxford: Blackwell.
Lukes, Steven, 1976 Power: A Radical View London: Macmillan.
Matza, David, 1969 Becoming Devianc Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall.
McCaghy, Charles, H., "Drinking and Deviance Disavowal: The Case of Child Moles-
1968 ters", Social Problems, 16, 4 3 - 9 .
McHugh, Peter, et al., On the Beginning of Social Inquiry, London: R.K.P.
1974
Mills, C. Wright, "Language, Logic and Culture", "Situated Actions and Vocabu-
1974a, 1974b laries of Motive", both in his Power, Politics and People Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 423 - 38, 439 - 52.
Peters, R. S., 1963 The Concept of Motivation London: R. K. P.
Plummer, Ken, 1979 "Misunderstanding Labelling Perspectives", in David Downes and
Paul Rock, (eds.) Deviant Interpretations Oxford: Martin Rob-
ertson, 85 - 121.
Polsky, Ned, 1967 Hustlers, Beats, and Others Chicago: Aldine.

44
Reiss, Albert, J., "The Social Integration of Queers and Peers", in Howard S.
1961 Becker (ed.) The Other Side Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 181 -
210.
Rose, Arnold, M., "A Systematic Summary of Symbolic Interaction Theory", in
1962 Rose, Human Behaviour and Social Process 3-19.
Rosenberg, Bernard, The Varieties of Delinquent Experience Waltham, Mass.: Xerox
and Silverstein, Harry, College Publishing.
1969
Scott, Marvin, B., "Accounts", American Sociological Review, 33, 46 - 62. 1970
1968 "Accounts, Devinace, and Social Order", in Jack D. Douglas
(ed.), Deviance and Respectability New York: Basic Books,
89-119.
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1974
Speier, Matthew, "The Everyday World of the Child", in Douglas, Understanding
1971 Everyday Life, 1 8 8 - 2 1 7 . 1972 "Some Conversational Prob-
lems for Interactional Analysis", in Sudnow, Studies in Social
Interaction, 397 - 427.
Strauss, Anselm, L., Mirrors and Masks San Francisco: The Sociology Press.
1969
Sykes, Gresham, "Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency",
and Matza, David, American Sociological Review, 22, 6 6 4 - 7 0 .
1957
Taylor, Brian, 1976a "Motives for guilt-free pederasty: Some Literary Considera-
tions", Sociological Review, 24, 9 7 - 1 1 4 . 1976b "Conversion
and cognition: An Area for Empirical Study in The Microsocio-
logy of Religious Knowledge", Social Compass, 23, 5 - 2 2
1978, "Recollection and Membership: Converts' Talk and the
Ratiocination of Commonality", Sociology, 1 2 , 3 1 6 - 2 4 .
Taylor, Ian, et al The New Criminology, London: R.K.P.
1973
Taylor, Laurie, 1971 Deviance and Society London: Michael Joseph 1972 "The
Significance and Interpretation of Replies to Motivational
Questions: The Case of Sex Offenders", Sociology, 6, 23 - 29.
1979 "Vocabularies, Rhetorics and Grammar: Problems in the
Sociology of Motivation", in Downes and Rock, Deviant Inter-
pretations, 1 4 5 - 6 1 .
Taylor, Laurie, and "Industrial Sabotage: Motives and Meanings", in Stanley Cohen,
Walton, Paul, 1971 (ed.), Images of Deviance Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2 1 9 - 4 5 .
Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity London: Oxford University Press.
1974
Weber, Max, 1970 "Science as a Vocation", in H. H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds.),
From Max Weber London: R.K.P. 1 2 9 - 5 6 .
Wootton, Anthony, Dilemmas of Discourse London: George Allen and Unwin.
1975

45