Moral entrepreneurs

Besides conforming to self-fulfilling prophecies, such statements illustrate Becker s point about the imique dilemma of the moral entrepreneur who has to defend the success of his methods and at the same time contend that the problem is getting worse. ... 

Although such claims might be accurate in regard to the official media of public opinion and the professional moral entrepreneurs, my own evidence suggests that public opinion gravitated away from the extremes at both ends ( Clamp down, keep them out and Welcome them ) and took up an indeterminate position somewhere between apathy and the punitive extreme. In any event, the... 

It is extremely unlikely that Blake himself made this concession his whole enterprise was based on the perception that the authorities had failed, f During a conversation with Blake over this weekend, he apologized that I had to travel all the way to Beachside and not see any trouble. Moral entrepreneurs have some interest in the continuation of the deviance they object to in order to justify their own actions. 

The use of atrocity stories to legitimate forms of control is, of course, a technique well known to moral entrepreneurs. Becker quotes a story of an entire family being murdered by an addict which was used by the Federal Narcotics Bureau in campaigning for the Marijuana Tax Act (op. dt. p. 142). Advocates of LSD control similarly use stories of trippers walking in front of cars or stepping out of twenty-storey windows. See Mandel, op. cit., for a well-documented account of the mythical nature of one such story. 

These new entreprenems listen, they allow themselves to feel, they give generously of their money and their time, they seek balance and fulfillment. They no longer beHeve the lie that to be successful in business, one has to leave one s morals, values, beliefs, and soul at the door in order to enter the gilded halls of enterprise. These organic entrepreneurs, as I call them, respect the soil in which they are plant-... 

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