Page 160 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

NORM (ALIZATION)

common news footage and a shared professional culture has led to substantial
convergence of news stories that may reflect a drift towards an international
standardization of basic journalistic discourses and the domination of global news
agendas by Western news agencies. However, the fact that Western news agencies 137
tend to supply ‘spot news’ and visual reports without commentary still allows
different verbal interpretations of events to be dubbed over the pictures. This has
led to what one may call the localization of global news and can be regarded as a
countervailing force to the pull of globalization.
Links Hegemony, ideology, mass media, realism, representation, television

Norm (alization) The concept of a norm refers to a social and cultural rule that
governs patterns of activity. This would include such things as moral and ethical
imperatives, the customs and practices of a culture and the law. On the one hand
a norm can be understood as the statistically common or ‘normal’, while on the
other hand it represents a prescribed form of behaviour upheld by the use of
sanctions. Although analytically distinct, cultural practice frequently blurs the
boundaries between these two uses of the term. Classical sociology has understood
norms to be acquired through the process of social learning or socialization that
enables actors to be competent and accepted agents. Structuralist perspectives regard
norms as existing outside of individual agents in the structures of society. However
‘action theory’ holds them to be carried by actors and developed through the
processes of symbolic negotiation.
Many writers within cultural studies deploy the idea of ‘normalization’ derived
from Foucault rather than the more sociologically located concept of a norm. For
Foucault the processes of normalization form part of the ‘disciplinary’ character of
modern institutions, practices and discourses by which ‘docile bodies’ are subjected,
used, transformed and improved. Here ‘normalization’ refers to processes by which
individual subjects can be distributed around a system of graded and measurable
categories and intervals which constitute the norm. Thus, discipline involves the
organization of the subject in space through dividing practices, training and
standardization in order to produce subjects by categorizing and naming them in
a hierarchical order through a rationality of efficiency, productivity and
‘normalization’.
For example, Western medicine and judiciary systems have increasingly appealed
to statistical measures and distributions to judge what is normal. This leads, for
example, not only to classifications of what is sane and mad but also to degrees of
‘mental illness’. Classificatory systems are essential to the processes of
normalization and thus to the creation of a range of subjects so that normalization
forms a part of the productivity of power in the generation of subjects.

Links Acculturation, agency, discourse, power, structure, subjectivity