TITLE:
Clinical Sociology and Moral Hegemony
AUTHORS:
Hans Petter Sand
KEYWORDS:
Gangs; Marxist Framework; Moral Hegemony; Contested; Frederic M. Thrasher
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.3 No.7,
November
7,
2013
ABSTRACT: The article presents a critique of a dominant way of analysing gang conflict in Norwegian sociology. The research in question uses a rather crude Marxist analysis that could somehow fit any gang conflict in the country. However, this kind of analysis was gradually put in question first by professor Ottar Brox and his criticism of the moral hegemony by a group of Marxists gathered around the publication “Klassekampen” (“Class Struggle”). Then the analysis was challenged by gang-researchers who reached back to the classical study of Frederic M. Thrasher, finding the latter more fruitful for analysis. Antonio Gramsci (1891- 1937) who coined the term cultural hegemony used it to describe how a social class can manipulate the system of values in a society to establish a ruling class world-view. In my context the term moral hegemony is used to show how an intellectual group came to dominate the discourse on relations between Norwegians and immigrants, labelling other views as “racist”.