Exceptions to the Trend: The Construction and Consequences of Organizational Deviance

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment II

Abstract

Changes in penal policy and administration, from the birth of the prison to mass incarceration, have been a major focus of the punishment literature. While scholars increasingly document exceptions to major penal trends, exceptionalism and its consequences for reticent organizations remain an under-theorized area of punishment studies. To this end, I develop the notion of organizational deviance. Extant theories of organizational deviance examine criminal or unlawful organizational behavior or lawful organizational behavior that inadvertently results in negative consequences. Drawing on neo-institutional theory’s emphasis on the importance of an organization’s environment and the importance of legitimacy conferred through conformity, I define organizational deviance as organizational behavior that violates the norms, standards, or expectations of the organizational field or its larger environments, and is therefore treated as problematic. I use a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829-1875) and its use of long-term solitary confinement to illustrate the process by which an organization becomes and remains deviant. I examine the vicious debates over prison design/management that constructed Eastern as deviant, and Eastern’s administrators’ responses to the mantle of deviance, using Sykes and Matza’s (1957) classic techniques of neutralization. I suggest these discourses contributed to the diffusion of the antebellum prison.

Author

• Ashley T. Rubin, Florida State University