Deviance, Conformity, and Social Control in Canada, 7th edition

For courses in Deviance and Deviance in Criminology.

Provides a broad, accessible, and critical introduction to the study of deviance. Unlike other texts on the market, it introduces both objective and subjective theoretical approaches in two early chapters and devotes the remainder of the text to substantive issues of particular interest to students. Each of these issues is then critically assessed and cohesively presented within a broader sociocultural context.

Hallmark Approach

• Pedagogical aids for students appear throughout every chapter. Students are asked to engage with the material as they read it. Ask Yourself sections direct students to think about certain questions, their own lives, or their own points of view. Exercise Your Mind sections ask to explore particular issues in more detail. Time to Review sections present students with review questions at regular intervals throughout the chapters. Although these features are formulated as pedagogical aids for students, many instructors report that they make use of them as class activities or assignments or to stimulate class discussion.
• Objective and subjective approaches to deviance are integrated in the content, rather than only one or the other being focused on. They are also presented as complementary (rather than contradictory) approaches.
• The topics of the substantive chapters are relevant to students’ lives — media, sexuality, youth, voluntary and involuntary physical appearance, mental disorders, religious belief systems, and scientific belief systems. The topics illustrate that deviance is not a characteristic of particular Others but rather a set of processes that students themselves are subjected to and participate in each day.
• Each of the substantive chapters reveals the deviance dance. That is, each chapter demonstrates how the social typing of deviance is not a uniform process but is characterized by disagreement, debate, and resistance.
• Each of the substantive chapters tells a cohesive story. Students are not bombarded with an assortment of cafeteria-style facts and theories; rather, they learn about the sociocultural context within which particular forms of deviance are socially typed and socially controlled.
• In the narrative of each chapter, both criminal and non-criminal forms of deviance are explored in relation to the topic at hand.

New to this Edition

• Current Events Bulletins present insights into ongoing stories in the media as they relate to the chapter topics. Once a year, selected chapters will be updated to follow progress on an existing story or to cover emerging new issues.
• Self-Study Questions are assessment-based multiple-choice questions with answers and feedback for students to assess their understanding of the chapter content and learning objectives.
• New Exercise Your Mind activity where students apply the various forms of harm to people who refused to follow public health measures during the pandemic.
• A new discussion of how digital environments add a new dimension to differential opportunity theory, providing a landscape of legitimate and illegitimate opportunities.
• The section on Indigenous understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, and kinship, along with the effects of settler colonialism, has been revised and expanded.