Was there ever a “labelling school”?
The sociology of social problems reached a turning point in the 1960s with the emergence of a new way of dealing with “deviance”, put forward in books and articles by Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, Joseph Gusfield, Fred Davis, Aaron Cicourel, and others. This article looks back at this key moment. In reviewing the journal Social Problems (1961-1965), it challenges the notion that there was ever something like a unified “labelling school”. It recalls the importance of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society as the institutional settings for this theoretical shift. It discusses the novelty of what will later be referred to as interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches. Lastly, it reviews the categories of societal response, careers and cultures, moral crusade, and social control, which have since become classic. And it asks a series of questions that will henceforth apply to the study of public problems : who suffers and who acts ? Who counts and measures ? Who accuses and condemns ? Who surveils and punishes ?