This essay calls for scholars of crime, law, and deviance to fundamentally expand how we engage with Howard Becker’s legacy. For decades, Outsiders has been our canonical text, shaping how we understand labeling, moral entrepreneurship, and the social construction of deviance. Yet, it is Art Worlds, Becker’s foundational work on the production of culture, that offers one of the most powerful frameworks for adapting our subfield to the digital age. In a world where gangs, White supremacists, cops, and moral crusaders have all become digital content creators, the collaborative production of deviance has become widely visible, massively participatory, and increasingly monetized online. Becker’s Art Worlds helps us map the hidden coordination, conventions, and constraints that produce this work. It also reveals a wider array of actors—platform engineers, promoters, algorithms, advertisers, and other “invisible” collaborators—who participate in, enable, and shape deviant behavior. This approach expands inquiry beyond the visible performer, allowing us to reconceptualize the role of culture, shift from deficit-based to asset-based accounts, and more accurately appraise the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. By revisiting Becker’s Art Worlds, we can build a roadmap for reimagining the sociology of crime, law, and deviance in the twenty-first century.
Scholars have argued that institutions privilege “good” victims of gender-based violence – those deemed sympathetic, morally upstanding, and worthy of public support. We extend existing research by synthesizing theories of good victimhood and theoretically distinguishing victims’ credibility in relation to the crime from their worthiness in relation to the state. Both credibility and worthiness are tied up in expectations of normative femininity. We then show how these processes operate in the case of victim compensation law, the only direct public benefit for crime victims. Our historical analysis reveals how policymakers proposed four restrictions to limit compensation to “good” victims, corresponding with victims’ credibility on the one hand, and worthiness on the other. With respect to credibility, eligible victims needed to present visible, embodied harm and could not have engaged in conduct that may have “contributed” to their victimization. With respect to worthiness, eligible victims were required to sever romantic ties with perpetrators and cooperate with police. By delineating credibility and worthiness as distinct components of good victimhood, we clarify how ideas of good victimhood infused specific eligibility restrictions in victim compensation law, while also equipping scholars with theoretical tools to understand logics of exclusion beyond our case.
Land is not simply a geological formation that exists apart from its interpretations embedded in sociality. Land receives robust meanings by virtue of its place in history, recognizing contemporary resonances. While scholars treat the reading of place as culturally generated, the process through which this occurs needs expansion. In this, ecology, history, and sociology are intimately linked in how past space-based events are brought to present concern. Based on seven years of ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, I examine how American Civil War enthusiasts treat the battlefields that they visit, describe, and preserve. I point to four ways in which Civil War battlefields become sites for memory-making and interactional domains. First, places are texts to be read for their imparted significance. Second, they allow for imagined histories through exploring blood-soaked land on which soldiers fought and died. Third, through group visits, the meanings of place depend on the existence of community. Finally, to preserve land in the face of competition by other claimants, organizations must “save” the land as touristic venues with institutional support. This analysis embraces Robert Zussman’s (2004) call to study people in places.
In this paper, I critically engage with Becker’s seminal work on marijuana consumption, challenging the notion of “becoming” a user as a straightforward process of taste acquisition. Drawing on the personal narratives of 38 current and former marijuana users, I show that “becoming” a marijuana user constitutes a dynamic state of tension rather than a linear trajectory with a terminal endpoint. In light of these tensions, even experienced users—despite having undergone the social processes that render an ambiguous activity coherent—face the ongoing threat of “unbecoming.” I contend that such destabilizing processes extend beyond marijuana use, highlighting how people's taken-for-granted relationships with experiential objects—sustained through processes of reality maintenance—risk lapsing into unfamiliarity. This study thus contributes to our understanding of experiential breaks and ruptures, offering insights into the fragility of the continuity underlying the world of common sense.
