TYPIFICATION

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2008

Typification is typical social construction based on standard assumptions.

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), a phenomenologist, suggests that in all of our encounters with others, with the exception of ‘we-relationships’ (the most intimate of relationships), we experience and understand the other in terms of ideal types.

In the process of typification we form a construct of a typical way of acting, assume typical underlying motivations or personality. For example we make prior assumptions about the personalities and behaviour of a doctor, priest or judge.

Ethnomethodologists have studied the use of this process of typification as a tool for understanding how people such as coroners, prosecutors, police officers and others achieve a sense of concreteness and predictability in their work.

Coroners for example, may operate with a sense of a typical suicide, prosecutors with a sense of a ‘normal’ crime of child abuse, police officers with a sense of the ‘normal’ or typical resident of a particular neighborhood.

Typification, Typologies, and Sociological Theory 
John C. McKinney
Social Forces, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Sep., 1969), 
Abstract: Typification, perceiving the world and structuring it by means of types and typologies, is depicted as an essential and intrinsic aspect of the basic orientation of actors to their situations. It is important for structuring the "self," conceptualizing "roles," and as a necessary feature of institutionalization and the development of social structure. Two basic orders of types are distinguished: the existential type, developed by participants in social systems, and the constructed type, formulated by the social scientist for purposes of explicating those social systems. All typification is viewed as consisting in the pragmatic reduction and equalization of attributes relevant to the particular purpose at hand for which the type has been formed, and involves disregarding those individual differences of the typified objects that are not relevant to such a purpose. It is asserted that types and typologies are ubiquitous, both in everyday social life and in the language of the social sciences. It is held that despite the omnipresence of typologizing in social inquiry it remains a relatively "underdeveloped" aspect of methodology generally. It is noted that a primary function of types and typologies is to identify, simplify, and order data so that they may be described in terms which make them comparable. An exploration of selected theoretical and methodological issues is conducted with respect to the construction and utilization of typologies, emphasizing problems of nominalism versus realism, ethnomethodology, social morphology, specification of the operations performed in the construction of types and the relation to general social theory, with particular reference to the social system as a construct. - jstor.org

The Racial and Ethnic Typification of Crime and the Criminal Typification of Race and Ethnicity in Local Television News 
Ted Chiricos, Sarah Eschholz 
Local news programming from three television stations in Orlando, Florida was analyzedfor racial and ethnic content in relation to crime. The data show that Blacks arenot overrepresented among TV news suspects relative to their proportion in the populationor among those arrested in Orlando. Hispanics are slightly overrepresented inrelation to their numbers in the population. Qualitatively, Blacks and especially Hispanicswho appear as crime suspects do so in more threatening contexts than Whites.Blacks are more likely to appear as criminal suspects than as victims or positive rolemodels, but this pattern is especially amplified for Hispanics. These results suggestthat local TV news may contribute to the social construction of threat in relation toBlacks and Hispanics, a condition that is associated with fear of crime, "modern racism,"and the mobilization of various social controls and exclusions. - jrc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/4/400

The return of the “Battered husband Syndrome” through the typification of women as violent
Martin D. Schwartz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, 45701-2979 Athens, OH, USA 
Walter S. DeKeseredy, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, K15 5B6 Ottawa, Ont, Canada 
Abstract The process of the social construction of woman abuse includes the essential idea of typification: that how we typify abused women can be a part of justifying help, or it can provide the scientific justification for a male discourse which legitimates abuse and buffers batterers from guilt. Because Straus and Gelles are widely used by the press and academics as authorities, it is essential to recognize their return to an ideological position they once seemingly abandoned: that women are as violent as men, are not acting in self-defense, and may be ultimately responsible for male violence. As this debate is carried on in public, newsmaking criminology must be used to provide the media with alternative feminist views. - springerlink.com/content/x012437163220085/

Punitive Attitudes and the Racial Typification of Crime
Kelly Welch
Florida State University
Abstract: The American criminal justice system is more punitive than any other industrialized country in the world. Various policies designed to “get tough” on criminals have been proliferating. While these punitive policies and practices have been used, the American public has also seemed to be more supportive of these harsh measures for dealing with suspected and convicted criminals. The public has often perceived that crime is a problem largely attributable to blacks. The idea for this research originated from the fact that many have conjectured a relationship between public punitiveness and the racial typification of crime. No one had yet produced empirical support for this claim.
Using national survey data I collected in the spring of 2002, I explore the possibility that perceptions of crime as a predominantly black phenomenon are related to more punitive attitudes about criminal justice, while controlling for other potential influences on punitiveness. Further, I assess whether viewing television crime news and crime dramas increase the likelihood of stereotyping blacks as criminals. Finally, I test for the presence of an indirect relationship between media consumption and punitive attitudes through the racial typification of crime.
Findings support the initial hypothesis of this research. Those who typify blacks as criminals are significantly more punitive in their criminal justice policy preferences than those who do not share similar racial perceptions. The relationship appears to be especially relevant for whites, and particularly for whites who are non-Southerners, less racially prejudiced, less concerned about crime, perceive crime to be less violent, and conservative. Results indicate that watching more local television news increases the black typification of crime for minorities, while whites typify crime as a black phenomenon more when they pay closer attention to television crime news. In addition, the present analyses show that media consumption is not indirectly associated with punitive attitudes through the racial typification of crime.
Overall, this research shows how the relationship between the racial typification of crime and punitiveness both augments and possibly expands aspects of the social threat and social control relationship postulated by Blalock (1967), Liska (1992), and others.

Racial Typification of Crime and Support for Punitive Measures
Kelly Welch, Ted Chiricos, Marc Gertz
Journal Title: Criminology, ISSN: 0011-1384 Volume: 42
Abstract: This paper assesses whether support for harsh punitive policies toward crime is related to the racial typification of crime for a national random sample of households (N=885), surveyed in 2002. Results from OLS regression show that the racial typification of crime is a significant predictor of punitiveness, independent of the influence of racial prejudice, conservatism, crime salience, southern residence and other factors. This relationship is shown to be concentrated among whites who are either less prejudiced, not southern, conservative and for whom crime salience is low. The results broaden our understanding of the links between racial threat and social control, beyond those typically associated with racial composition of place. They also resonate important themes in what some have termed modern racism and what others have described as the politics of exclusion.

The Portrayal of Gays and Lesbians on TV, and How Viewers React
Matthew Wood
"The visualisation of homosexuals has, to a great extent, led to negative stereotypical portrayals on television. However, as previously mentioned, some form of representation which is immediate and economical is required in order to show gayness to an audience. It is often impractical to portray a character's sexuality through narrative and, therefore, programmes rely on typification. The importance of gay typification is that it makes people visible to the viewer and keeps the homosexuality of a character present throughout the text. There are clearly both advantages and disadvantages to this form of typification. In typing certain characters we reduce everything about that character to sexuality. However, despite this, it allows homosexual perspectives to be ever present and gives gays and lesbians something to identify with clearly in the text. Typification compacts an abundance of social knowledge into a limited number of distinct signs, but is likely that many homosexuals never relate to the various gay types portrayed on television, and most gays and lesbians remain invisible for most, if not all their lives. Whilst typification leads to negative, stereotypical views of homosexuality, it is important to note that in many cases such types are used by homosexuals themselves. Gay sub-cultures have developed in such a way that many homosexual people have adopted lifestyles which are different to heterosexuals in many ways. Certain sections of the gay community have used various stereotypical gay signs quite willingly as a form of resistance to the negative categorisation of homosexuals."

Phenomenology and Typification: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz - NATANSON, Maurice.  - Social Research, v. 37, 1970, pp. 1-22.