The Controlological Pedigree

Abstract

The labelling perspective is dead: long live labelling theory. However, this book is a plea for reformulation, not one for resuscitation or rejuvenation. Rather than celebrate or bewail the currently morbid state of affairs, I hope instead to analytically reground the labelling approach. I think this is possible as labelling is vilified not so much because of its analytic inabilities, but rather because it has become an institutional failure. Since institutional failings are easier to correct than analytic ones are to patch up, there is still a chance that the magnificently imaginative scope of the labelling perspective might be refashioned as an intellectually and institutionally competent theory.

A fundamental direction that labelling analysis must take is toward the construction of propositions, which will make it more of a theory and less of an exercise in theorising. At the present time, labelling analysis consists largely of theorising, developing ideas that are not crystallised into theories but serve only to generate more loosely related ideas. (Ericson, 1975, p. 141).