Case Studies

Merton(1938) 

• Anomie: when there is a gap between goals and achievement

•  He also believed that American society was unbalanced because greater importance was attached to success, than to the ways in which that success was achieved. In the search for success by almost any means the danger is that the usual rules governing behaviour in society are abandoned, a situation of anomie results, where ‘anything goes’ in pursuit of wealth and material success

• He described five possible ways in which individuals could respond to success goals in American society.

 1. Conformity: this describes individuals who work towards achieving success by conventionally accepted means. Other conventional routes to success include talent, hard work and ambition. 

2. Innovation: this describes individuals who are unable to succeed using conventionally accepted routes and turn to deviant means, usually crime. Merton believed that this route was most likely to be taken by individuals who came from the lower levels of society.

3. Ritualism: this describes middle class individuals who are deviant because they abandon conventional success goals. They are unable to innovate because they have been strongly socialised to conform, but they have little opportunity for advancement.

4. Retreatism: this describes individuals from any social class position who are deviant because they abandon both success goals and any means of achieving them. They ‘drop out’ of society. 

5. Rebellion: this describes those individuals who reject success goals and the usual means of achieving them, but then replace those that they have rejected with different goals and means. They are deviant because they wish to create a new society, in Merton’s view they are typically members of a ‘rising’ social class who may well attempt to organise a revolution.

• Criticisms: He has also been criticised for his assumption that there is such a thing as a ‘value consensus’ in American society. 

• Criticisms: Merton has been criticised for not taking into account power relations in society,

• It has been suggested that his ‘deterministic’ view fails to adequately explain why only some individuals who experience anomie become criminals and that his theory exaggerates working class crime and underestimates middle class, ‘white collar’ crime.

Albert Cohen(1955)

• Cohen holds the view that cultural deprivation accounts for working class boys’ lack of educational success. They become stuck at the lowest level of the stratification system and as a consequence of their lack of opportunity, they suffer from status frustration

• They turn to criminality as an alternative route to success, becoming members of a criminal subculture which values activities such as stealing, vandalism and truancy. Those who perform well are glazed and praised by their peers

Criticisms: those who hold the view that working class youths do not necessarily accept mainstream success goals, but rather that they exhibit delinquent behaviour out of resentment against those whose values they do not share

Heidensohn(1985): female conformity

 She argues that maledominated patriarchal societies control women(control theory) more effectively than men, making it difficult for women to break the law. Women in such societies are closely controlled in the home, where they are expected to spend the majority of their time on housework and childcare.

• In public, women are controlled by the threat of male sexual violence and by the idea that inappropriate behaviour may bring loss of reputation and shame upon their families.

•  At work women are controlled by male-dominated hierarchies and workers organisations. They are subject to intimidation by various forms of sexual harassment. 

• In work -due to inequalities within work and the ‘glass ceiling’- women are more likely to be supervised at work.

Criticisms: Heidensohn makes generalisations that don’t apply for all women

Carlen(1988) 

• Carlen studied a group of mostly working class women aged between 15 and 46 who had been convicted of one or more crimes. 

• Unstructured interviews

• Carlen believes that control theory explains that humans are neither good or bad but will make rational decisions to turn to crime when the advantages outnumber the disadvantages

• In Carlen’s view, working-class women have been controlled through the promise of rewards

• When these rewards are not available or prove to be illusory, then criminality becomes a viable alternative.

Criticisms: Carlen’s work was based on a relatively small sample (39 women) but it supports the view that criminal behaviour becomes more likely when social control breaks down

McRobbie’s

Research into female subcultures found that girls were less likely to be part of deviant subcultures as they have their own “bedroom culture” in the private sphere where they would hang out with friends reading magazines, listening to pop music and gossiping about boys.

Becker(1963

• Becker argues that an act only becomes deviant when other people define it as one

• He argues that the ‘label’ of deviancy depends on who commits the act, who observes the act, when and where the act is committed and the negotiations that take place between the various actors involved

• Agents of the social control: people who have the power to make the label stick

• Assumptions will be made that the individuals concerned have the negative characteristics normally associated with the label. 

• As a consequence the individuals will begin to see themselves in terms of the label, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

• Deviant career: The process where an individual is given a label, acted according to that label (self-fulfilling prophecy), was neglected by groups of society which encouraged them to be deviant.

•  This career is completed when the individual joins an organised deviant group which develops a deviant subculture, this subculture develops beliefs and values which rationalise, justify and support deviant identities and behaviours.