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Erich Goode is an American sociologist. Goode specializes in the sociology of deviance. He has written a number of books on the field of deviance in general, as well as on specific deviant topics.

Erich Goode received a B.A. from Oberlin College (1960) and a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University (1966). He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. He is currently employed as a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Prof. Goode now teaches at the University of Maryland.

Goode takes a constructionist approach to deviance. In his view, a behavior is deviant if and only if society at large considers it so. The broader social factors that go into the classification of a behavior as deviant are thus considered a valid subject of study. His research focuses on the deviant individuals (and behaviors) themselves, as well as the particular individuals and groups that play a part in classifying the behavior as deviant.

As a sociologist, Goode makes no judgment about whether a particular is "bad" or "evil", and considers deviance as a topic to be entirely dependent on whether the society at large considers the behavior deviant. In this view, a particular behavior can be deviant in one society, but normal in another. This is in contrast to the perspective of essentialism, which would say that a behavior either "really is" deviant or "really isn't", and that it is the task of the sociologist to discover and report on the truth of the matter, and what society at large believes is mostly irrelevant.

According to the constructionist framework as espoused by Goode, an instance of "deviance" can exist as a social construct exclusively, completely separate from any actual behavior. In other words, "imaginary deviance" can exist that causes a frenzy of interesting sociological behavior in response to a non-existence phenomenon. Satanic ritual abuse is an example of this in modern times, and the case of witch hunts is an example from antiquity. These are often called moral panics, and Goode considers them a valid subject (perhaps the ideal subject) for deviance studies.

Erich Goode is known for his exploration and exposure of the "moral panic" concept. He takes a "harm reductionist" approach to studying social deviance. This commitment aims to reduce social harm without engaging in value judgments or essentialist claims about those being studied.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Erich Goode", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0