Overview

Deviance, Morality, and Power: Making Sense of a Fractured America explores how, reconceived and retooled, sociological approaches and concepts developed to understand deviance and normality can help us address the political, social, and cultural issues that have led to a deeply divided and conflict-ridden country. The text examines how social cohesion and stability is achieved and maintained through conflict in which groups with competing and conflicting material interests and moral visions struggle for power. It underscores how the United States embraces the seemingly contradictory ideals of individualism and popular rule, and how these conflicting ideals create an environment of competition and conflict. Readers are challenged to view deviance as a moral category connected to a moral vision of what kind of nation we believe we ought to strive to become and what kind of institutional order could embody that vision. The book proposes the reconsideration of key concepts and approaches in sociology to envision fresh applications for contemporary times and modern challenges. Featuring a fresh perspective of deviance as a fundamentally political process, Deviance, Morality, and Power is an ideal textbook for courses in sociology, especially those that examine deviance and modern applications of sociological theory.

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9781516543212

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In Deviance, Morality and Power, Professor Kennedy argues that social scientists have failed because, in their pursuit of a philosophically-flawed notion of a 'value-free' science, they have largely ignored the fundamental truth that all societies need shared moral values if they are to survive and prosper. In a panoramic survey of modern US history and American social science, Kennedy shows that value-based consensuses are both created and lost politically, and what that teaches us about how social consensus may be recreated now in the USA. These are difficult questions, involving philosophy, politics, and economics as well as sociology. But in a text designed for teaching, Dev Kennedy manages to explain them in a way that will be readily accessible to any and all students and their teachers. This book is a triumph, intellectually and pedagogically. Gavin Kitching, Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia This timely and reader-friendly textbook provides an overview about how sociological concepts of deviance developed in the U.S. through social crises and political conflicts since the first gilded age until present day's conflagrations. In the second part, it elaborates on the dynamics of social construction of deviance and consensus through power and morality struggles and offers a pathway to overcome current divisions and fragmentation through the development of new shared moral visions and rational policies. Kennedy connects his theoretical introduction with real-world questions of how we should make society better and resolve practical societal problems through the development of reason, trust, and cohesion. This introduction inspires conversations and action with reflective questions, directions, graphs, pictures, and supplemental resources. An excellent resource for students in sociology, social work, criminal justice, and liberal studies, yet accessible to the the interested lay person, too. Hermann Kurthen, Grand Valley State University, Michigan

Author Information

Devereaux Kennedy earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Binghamton University. Dr. Kennedy is an emeritus professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where he taught courses in sociological theory, as well as social deviance and social control. His research interests include social control and long-range, global social change.

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