A Critique of Howard S. Becker's Requirements for Cultural Membership

Culture ties people together and gives people the identity, but people need to follow a set of norms to become a member of a culture. If someone deviates from cultural norms, does it mean that this person is not a member of the culture they believe? In this article we show that Becker's claim in "Culture: Sociological Perspectives" is flawed due to the use of erroneous analogy, the history of rapid social change, and the uniqueness of the micro social background. Becker's initial debate on how culture works from a sociological point of view is based on his analogy of jazz bands and culture as a whole.

Frank Tannenbaum and Howard S. Becker have created and developed a label theory which is the central aspect of the semiotic interaction often called Tannenbaum's "evil dramaization". Becker believes that social groups create deviations by developing rules constituting violations. Labeling is a social response process of social reactions, social reactions of people of society, judging behavior of one person as abnormality or other means, and correspondingly defining (marking) it. It is characterized by "inventing, selecting, manipulating beliefs, defining behavior in a negative way, and selecting people for these categories."

Social deviation is a violation of social norms. So, what is social bias? According to sociologist Howard Becker, the best definition of social bias is "This is not a behavior itself, it is a reaction to behavior, it is doing abnormal things". Many abnormal practices, in other cultures, this is standard. In many countries around the world, girls are 11 years old married. For Americans this is considered child abuse

Howard Becker argues that deviation is a creation of a social group rather than a specific behavior or behavioral quality, as described in "External people: deviations from sociological studies" (1963) . Becker (1963) criticizes the existence of deviations from other theoretical acceptance bias and by doing so, tolerates the majority value in the social group. Becker (1963) argues that it is not important to study personal behaviors because deviations are mere rules of destructive behavior and are marked as abnormal by people with power status. Violations are constant and labels of actions are different (Becker 1963). Becker (1963) explains the rules as a reflection of certain social norms held by the vast majority of societies, either formal or informal. The mandatory rule is the focus of Becker (1963)'s approach, which is applied in a variety of ways and brings some useful results to those who apply tags.