On the Mount Olympus Perspective

By concentrating our theorizing to data collected from the "outer perspective" (standing on Mount Olympus), many sociologists have led themselves and each other into a blind alley, resulting in the development of elaborate theoretical schemes to explain behavior which does not exist other than as a facade. This article takes four recent. Scandinavian studies in the field of deviant behavior and uses them to illustrate four basic problems with the Mount Olympus perspective; non-normative assumptions, significant questions, penetrating the surface of ones data, and what could be called academic endogamy. These studies are compared with a study done from the "inner perspective".