Copy Becker's whole paragraph. Link to Becker's page.

Questions:

1. Who makes up the label?

People who are inside trying to socialize those whom they believe have not effectively internalized the behaviors which make one acceptable as an insider. To make up the label, one would have to have some authority within the system of "insiders."

Who has such authority?

Parents over underage children.

Teachers over children, or students in general, if those teachers have the authority to certify the student as competent/incompetent in specific areas of expertise, like math or English.

Police over all of us, in the matter of law.

Employers over employees.

Elected officials over those they are elected to represent.

2. Becker says labels are applied to "particular people." Does he mean that before we apply the label we require the "labelor" to know the local narrative and social context of the person to whom the lable will be applied?

No, I don't think so. I think "particular people" refers here to those people who exhibit within the labelor's area of control behavior which is not socially acceptable in that area of control. Thus, a government researcher who labels a kid "good kid" would mean that the kid does not rob, use drugs, use violence against others. The researcher will not even have access to or knowledge of the young person's total array of behavior, so the label actually covers only behavior that the researcher knows about. And "bad kid" would mean that the young person does engage in some such unacceptable behavior that comes to the attention of the labelor, either through disruption in the social context the labelor controls, or through reports of the young person's behavior through other sources.

3. What are the validity and quality controls on such labeling?

There would appear to be no such controls. We tend to label informally, teachers reporting prior behavior to other teachers, formal reports, like grade point averages, reporting past performance, observed behavior. When one teacher tells another that Joe Grime is a "troublemaker," based on her experience with him in her class last year, the new teacher rarely challenges or reassesses that evaluation. The new teacher doesn't even have access to the actual transactions on which the evaluation is based, for unlike Nixon's presidential office, there are no tapes of the classroom transactions the first teacher used to form her opinion of the young person. So all we can do is accept her conclusion of what the transactions showed, and, at best, remind ourselves that there may have been many factors and many perspectives she did not know, or did not take into account. We can try to keep an open mind, and continue to listen to Joe Grime in good faith.