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Foucault Vs Durkheim

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Durkheim and Foucault on Juvenile Delinquency Yuhan Ding Word account: 1404 Juvenile delinquency has been seen as an important social issue in contemporary societies. In this essay, I will demonstrate that both Durkheim and Foucault’s sociological theories are useful to understand the juvenile delinquency, they both considered juvenile delinquency in a social level, but have some differences in terms of power and construction of youth. First, I will demonstrate Durkheim’s theory of social facts and social integration, and discuss how they can explain the issue of juvenile delinquency. Second, Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge will also be applied to understand this issue, I will show the way knowledge and discourse of ‘at-risk’ contribute to the control and construction of youth. After that, the final part of this essay will be comparing and contrasting of these two theories. The sociological theory of Durkheim concentrates on the primary of social rather than individual. His theory of social facts focuses on the power of social norms and social …show more content…

First, while both Durkheim and Foucault talk about the power over youth, Durkheim’s theory concerns about the coercive power of social facts, such as social norms and morality, and the functionality of social integration in this issue. However, in Foucault’s theory of power, it traces the way that knowledge and institutions generates power to control adolescence, and demonstrates how the power is transformed from the earlier to contemporary societies. In addition, from Durkheim’s theoretical framework, juvenile delinquency is a real social phenomenon. However, for Foucault, youth at risk in crime or the problematization of youth are constructed by authorities and experts to generates power to control young people, it limits the way of behavior of adolescence, making them develop in a certain way and become a certain kind of

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