Moral Entrepreneur

A moral entrepreneur is an individual, group, or formal organization that seeks to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm; altering the boundaries of altruism, deviance, duty or compassion.

Moral entrepreneurs take the lead in labeling a particular behaviour and spreading or popularizing this label throughout society. This can include attributing negative labels to behaviour, the removal of negative labels, positive labeling, and the removal of positive labels. The moral entrepreneur may press for the creation or enforcement of a norm for any number of reasons, altruistic or selfish. Such individuals or groups also hold the power to generate moral panic; similarly, multiple moral entrepreneurs may have conflicting goals and work to counteract each other. Some examples of moral entrepreneurs include: MADD (mothers against drunk driving), the anti-tobacco lobby, the gun-control lobby, anti-pornography groups, Black Lives Matter and LGBT social movements, as well as the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements, which are an example of two moral entrepreneurs working against each other on a single issue.

Social Issues

Moral Entrepreneurs contribute essentially to moral panic and moral emergence. It is owing to their creation of chaos with vernaculars that dramatize, name, and interpret them. Did you know that these people or groups use an oratorical tool called Typifying while identifying and defining social problems.

The term moral entrepreneur was coined by sociologist Howard S. Becker in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963) in order to help explore the relationship between law and morality, as well as to explain how deviant social categories become defined and entrenched. In Becker’s view, moral entrepreneurs fall into roughly two categories: rule creators, and rule enforcers.

Rule creators generally express the conviction that some kind of threatening social evil exists that must be combated. “The prototype of the rule creator,” Becker explains, is the “crusading reformer:”