Definition
Deviance is action, identity, or appearance that a particular group, at a particular time, treats as a departure from its accepted norms. It is the broader category that contains crime: every crime is deviance, but plenty of deviance — tattoos, atheism, queerness, refusing to marry — has been outside the criminal law in some places while being heavily sanctioned in others.
Howard Becker's formulation in Outsiders (1963) became canonical: deviance is not a quality of the act, but the consequence of a rule's application to a person. The same act becomes deviant when audiences label it so, and the sociology of deviance therefore studies the rule-making, rule-applying, and rule-breaking together rather than focusing on offenders alone.
Why it matters
How it works
Analysts examine three connected processes: how rules are made (legislatures, professions, moral entrepreneurs), how rules are applied (police, schools, employers, family), and how individuals come to enact and identify with deviant roles. Variation across these processes — by class, gender, race, neighbourhood — exposes the inequalities embedded in normality itself, which is why deviance is the entry point for labelling theory, feminist criminology, and the sociology of social control.
The concept resists biological or moral framings. An act is deviant relative to a community's rules, not in itself; rules change; communities disagree. That instability is the analytical value of the term — it forces the question "deviant to whom, and on whose authority?" before any explanation of cause.