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A multitude of services are utilized in efforts for assisting youth-at-risk to re-establish a pro-social lifestyle. While cooperation and multi-level interventions are needed since there are multiple causes for youth-at-risk problems, conventional approaches include working with youths-at-risk individually, their peers, their families, their schools, and their communities. The three perspectives traditionally employed in examining deviance and youth problems are the sociological perspective, the psychological perspective, and the physiological perspective. This chapter suggests that “user or client participation” may be the most effective way at working at the individual level since youths-at-risk feel encouraged to participate in the helping process when given the chance. Also, the chapter presents the criminalization process as a method for better understanding gradual engagement in crime and delinquency.

From a sociological perspective, Doug Risner explores the many biases and challenges boys and men in ballet face in the classroom and beyond. Themes revealed in case studies and analysis include gender norms, heterocentric biases, isolation, peer pressure, lack of positive male role models and parental support, sexual harassment, and the lack of support systems for boys in dance education. The chapter concludes with suggestions for parents and dance educators that would increase support for boys and men in ballet.

Legal closure implies diverse but interconnected understandings of law. This chapter sets out to defend the utility of a sociological perspective, or set of perspectives, on legal closure. It distinguishes two approaches to legal closure: normative closure and discursive closure. The aim here is not to show that conceptions of normative or discursive legal closure are misguided in the particular contexts in which these conceptions have been developed, but that they can be reconsidered in a broader sociological perspective. Such a perspective ultimately denies that law is adequately understood as a ‘closed’ system, knowledge field, intellectual discipline, or discourse. But it recognises the social conditions that may make law so appear, or which seem to impel the ‘legal’ to seek to achieve ‘closure’ in a variety of ways. Viewed sociologically, legal closure can be treated primarily as a means by which various forms of legal or political practice attempt to enhance their own legitimacy. Autopoiesis theory, developed in relation to law by Niklas Lubmann and Gunther Teubner, postulates a form of legal closure as radical as any to be found or implied in the literature of legal philosophy.

This chapter considers a second approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with the effort to make clear that the social scene and the individual persons who compose it can be viewed as quite different entities. Sociologists know how to approach their subject matter as an assembly of parts. At the same time, they are cognizant of the fact that the social world, in essence, is a continuous field of force—a thing of drifts and tides and currents and flows. Human beings are all caught up in those drifts and flows, often without knowing that to be so. Autonomy is not a quality gained by asserting it to be so (“we believe in free will”). It is a quality to be gained by becoming aware of and coping with the social forces that make up the world in which we live.

This chapter considers a third approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with viewing a wholly familiar social reality in the way a newcomer, a stranger, might. It may be assumed that sociologists know more about the lay of their land than most others do. After all, they spend a significant amount of time investigating various corners of the social world, and to that extent they can be thought of as seasoned, knowing, and experienced about human life. At the same time, however, sociologists can be viewed as strangers to the lands they study, for it is one of their tasks to look at the social world almost as if they were seeing it for the first time. The chapter explains how sociologists may be newcomers to the locations they study and discusses the ways that they deal with deviant behavior.

In this chapter a nurse/sociologist and an historian discuss how their academic backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives shaped both what they saw and what they overlooked during the process of conducting ethnographic research for this project. For both authors, doing ethnography was a new endeavor, although each had published on long-term residential care within their own disciplines. The chapter highlights how an historical gaze focused one author’s attention toward the significance of location, sense of place, cultural memory, and origin stories in writing fieldnotes on the nursing homes he visited. The nurse/sociologist concentrated on issues surrounding the gendered division of labor, health and safety, workplace accountability, and differing emphases upon social as opposed to medical care. Over time, through conversations with team members and each other, their fieldnotes increasingly incorporated shared perspectives on the significance of location, heritage, workplace practices and tensions between social and medical care.