Assignment: For this assignment, you need to do the following: Research a deviant act that was conducted in a public place.Describe the act.What were the reactions to the deviant act?Analyze and discu

Week 4- Assignment, Rubric, & Lesson Content

Assignment:

For this assignment, you need to do the following:

• Research a deviant act that was conducted in a public place.

• Describe the act.

• What were the reactions to the deviant act?

• Analyze and discuss the act using the theoretical perspective(s) that you believe best explains the reactions to the deviant act.

• Your paper should be a minimum of 3-5 pages in length.

• Remember to submit an APA formatted reference page.

Save your assignment as a Microsoft Word document.

Rubric:

Lesson Content:

Personal Internet Usage at Work: A Source of Recovery.

Deviances in the Virtual Reality or the Character-Altering Power of Virtual Communities.

Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1

Deviance in the Business World

As you remember Conflict Theory has its roots with Karl Marx, while C. Wright Mills has been called the father of modern conflict theory. In his view, social structures are created through conflict between people with differing interests and resources. Individuals and resources in turn are influenced by those structures and by the unequal distribution of power and resources; much liked the digital divide we mentioned in the previous lesson.

This lesson will look at some examples of deviant acts that are contrary to business norms and values, and have the ability to cause harm to the organization.

To understand how sociology, sociological theory, and cyber-technology work together, there has to be knowledge of conflict theory as well as how it relates to deviance and to technology:

From the definition of conflict theory, it is easy to see that deviance has its roots in the theory. Deviance has been best described as any behavior that violates social norms considered significant to the majority of a group or society, and responds negatively to their violation.

Note also, that it is not the act itself, but the reaction to the act that makes something deviant. Therefore, what may be deviant in one society or group may not be in deviant in a different society or group.

Managing Deviance

Because of the conflict and deviance within society, and the advent of technology, it is essential to have management of the conflict and deviance.

Since the 1980's, the amount of time spent by management in dealing with this problem has doubled. Much of this can be based on the growing complexity of organizations, the use of teams, and group decisions, making globalization the result because of the use of the advancements in technology. What happens is groups possess attitudes, values, skills, goals, resources desired by other groups, or even conflict within their own values, norms or ideals; the two parties are interdependent in the performance of functions or activities, thereby creating conflict and deviant behavior. With this chain of events, there becomes a need to have conflict management that deals with the conflict and deviance in the field of technology.

When we look at technology and the business world, DeSanctis and Poole's three dimension theory on technology will help us understand some of the ways technology plays a part in sociology.

DeSanctis and Poole's Three Dimension Theory

1. Decision-making: the view of engineers associated with positivist, rational systems rationalization, and deterministic approaches.

2. Institutional school: technology is an opportunity for changing focuses on social evolution, social construction of meaning, interaction and historical progresses, interpretive flexibility and an interplay between technology and power.

3. An integrated perspective (social technology): soft-line determinism with joint social and technological optimization, structural symbolic interaction theory.

With the advent of the Internet came the transformation in accessibility of information, enabling individuals with common beliefs to find each other and reinforce behaviors considered unacceptable.

Try the following matching game to see how pathological individuals and the internet are used for deviant behavior:

Note: In order to play the game, you will need to link the words in groups. Click on any element and then complete its group according to the criteria specified on the top. If you want to unselect an element, click on it again.

Remember it is not the act but the reaction to the act that makes something deviant.

So when we look for the answer it depends on the perspective of the labeler as to something or someone being labeled deviant.

So we can see that this then will follow through for those in power, in terms of labeling some acts as resistance by fellow employees. But, if that same act is carried out by a group of employees, it may be labeled as terrorism by the employer, while at the same time, labeled freedom fighting by the co-workers.

As you can imagine, the primary method of controlling deviance within the work place has been to increase manager control of employee's time, efforts, and access to organizational goods. What has been noticed, is that there is a relationship between increased social control on the part of the employer and increased levels of employee deviant behavior. So in the workplace, the tools of technology may also become the tools of the deviant employee.

Raze.com

To see how deviance is handled within the business community, let's take a look at how one business dealt with it and the outcome. Remember that just because this is about a business, many of the concepts also apply to society as a whole.

Our tech business will be called Raze.com. It is a small but growing company that writes software and websites for businesses, especially those in the large scale e-commerce.

With the company's growth, management decided to increase social control over the employees, fearing that the competition between employees could create strife and even deviant behavior:

• They changed the programming language that was considered open source, free and uncontrolled to a newer language.

• Older employees, once experts in the original language, are now on the same playing field as the newer employees.

• The hierarchy is no longer stable, but restricted, and competition was fostered between employees, creating a power struggle with the owners having more control.

• Game playing that lead to a work environment that had fostered and helped to drive innovation became stale, and gaming consoles were finally removed.

• The desire of management was to keep the gaming attitude, but to limit so much time spent as they saw it as just game playing, not developing technology.

To make matters worse the technological industry took a turn and ended in a black time for those working in the industry.

The oldest employees of Raze.com feared that they might not have employment, which created "bugs" within the programs developed so that longer hours had to be spent working with tempers flaring.

With the need to stabilize Raze.com, major changes were needed to survive the down turn in the industry half the employees were laid off, the company supplied kitchen was closed to save money, meaning the free food was no longer available.

The remaining employees started to doubt the expertise of management and the idea that Raze.com was a sinking ship surfaced. So the employees started reacting. Since it was a technology business, employees started to commit acts that could be construed as deviance or resistance. So here is a list of behaviors that the employees demonstrated:

• They started to intentionally produce error filled codes

• publically depicted themselves as being assaulted by managers

• publically depicted the products as of poor quality

• started spending more time just playing games on the latest gaming systems

• increased off-site breaks from work

• decreased hours spent at work

• directly disobeyed manager's request for meeting attendance and to produce more.

Do those acts fit the criteria for deviance and resistance?

Andria Hoplight Topia in her article entitled "Human Capital Issues in a Knowledge-based Environment" states the following:

1. Acts contrary to organizational norms and values with the potential to cause harm to the organization

2. Deviant behavior is infused with emotional qualities such as anger, frustration, jealousy, resentment

3. Deviant behavior is committed by all forms of human beings, not just the mentally unstable

4. Deviant behavior is committed by employees who occupy all levels of an organization, not just the lowest

5. Deviant behavior is sporadic in nature, the acts are not committed continuously but are tied to particular organizational and management changed in policy or acts.

6. Deviant behavior is committed in information and communication technology rich environments which allows for these acts to take different forms, reaching other audiences and having more intense effects.

In relationship to Raze.com it can be said that each of the six elements were present in the way employees and the employer dealt with their positions within the business. One would most likely see such a case as this ending in the gradual decline and failure of the business; which is just what happened to Raze.com.