SOCIETAL DEVIANCE IN THE ERA OF DISTORTED VALUES AND NORMS: EUROPEAN AND MACEDONIAN PARALELS

Abstract

We are living in an era of turbulent social changes that affect our everyday life. The contemporary societal order has been put to pressures and exposed to challenges like never before in the history of human society. Many scholars believe that what we are witnessing nowadays is an era of value ambivalence and norm relativization that is intricately related to societal deviance. Many theories, classical, modern, and postmodern elaborate these phenomena. Such are the Emile Durkheim’s theory of anomie, Robert Merton’s theory of strain and Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of interregnum. In this paper, we are trying to elaborate those theories through the lenses of the distorted morals and values and the nexus with societal deviance in comparative European and Macedonian societal context. As far as methodology is concerned, we mainly use secondary data of available scientific literature and studies in the values and norms changes and its relatedness to societal deviance. We shall try to prove and elucidate the importance of the structural changes in values and norms and how they produce or are a product of societal deviance. Although mainly comparatively theoretical, the paper will try to overcome the possible limitations with its thorough comparative analyses of the most relevant scientific literature and research on this matter, mostly from sociological, socio-pathological, philosophical and securitological point of view. The paper will also try to summarize some relevant suggestions, proposals and recommendations on how to overcome these problems in European and Macedonian comparative perspective. Keywords: Societal Deviance, Values, Norms, Europe, Macedonia