6.4.2- Strain Theory: How Mainstream Values Produce Deviance

 6..4.2: Strain Theory: How Mainstream Values Produce Deviance 

It is easy to think of crime as some alien element in our midst, something that is strange and unnatural. In contrast to this common view, functionalists view crime as a natural outcome of the conditions that people experience (Bernburg 2019). 

Even mainstream values can generate crime. Consider what sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960) identified as the crucial problem of the industrialized world: the need to locate and train talented people—whether they were born into wealth or into poverty—so that they can take over the key technical jobs of society. When children are born, no one knows which ones will have the ability to become dentists, nuclear physicists, or engineers. To get the most talented people to compete with one another, society tries to motivate everyone to strive for success.

We are quite successful in getting almost everyone to want cultural goals, success of some sort, such as wealth or prestige. But we are far from successful when it comes to providing everyone access to the institutionalized means, the legitimate ways to reach success. People who find their way to success blocked can come to see the cultural goals (such as working hard or pursuing higher education) as not applying to themselves. Sociologist Robert Merton (1956, 1949/1968) referred to this situation as anomie, a sense of normlessness. These people experience frustration, or what Merton called strain. Table 6.1 presents a summary of Merton’s strain theory. The most common reaction to means and goals is conformity. Most people find at least adequate access to the institutionalized means and use them to try to reach cultural goals. They try to get a quality education, good jobs, and so on. If well-paid jobs are unavailable, they take less desirable jobs. If they can’t get into Harvard or Stanford, they go to a state university. Others take night classes and go to vocational schools. In short, most people take the socially acceptable path. Table 6.1

Table 6.1 How People Match Their Goals to Their Means SOURCE: Based on Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949. Enlarged ed., 1968.

Four Deviant Paths The next four responses in Table 6.1 represent deviant reactions to the gap that people find between the goals they want and their access to the institutionalized means to reach them. Let’s look at each. 

Innovators are people who accept the goals of society but use illegitimate means to try to reach them. 

Embezzlers, for instance, accept the goal of achieving wealth, but they reject the legitimate avenues for doing so. 

Other examples are drug dealers, robbers, and con artists. 

The second deviant path is taken by people who start out wanting the cultural goals but become discouraged and give up on achieving them. 

Yet they still cling to conventional rules of conduct. 

Merton called this response ritualism. 

Although ritualists have given up on getting ahead at work, they survive by rigorously following the rules of their job. 

Teachers whose idealism is shattered (who are said to suffer from “burnout”), for example, remain in the classroom, where they teach without enthusiasm. 

Their response is considered deviant because they cling to the job even though they have abandoned the goal, which may have been to stimulate young minds or to make the world a better place.

People who choose the third deviant path, retreatism, reject both the cultural goals and the institutionalized means of achieving them.

 Some people stop pursuing success and retreat into alcohol or drugs. 

Although their path to withdrawal is considerably different, women who enter a convent or men a monastery are also retreatists. 

The final deviant response is rebellion. Convinced that their society is corrupt, rebels, like retreatists, reject both society’s goals and its institutionalized means. Unlike retreatists, however, rebels seek to give society new goals, as well as new means for reaching them. Revolutionaries are the most committed type of rebels. Merton either did not recognize anarchy as applying to his model or he did not think of it. In either case, the angry anarchist who wants to destroy society is not shown on Table 6.1. Like the retreatist and the rebel, anarchists have given up on both society’s goals and its means. Unlike the rebel, however, they do not want to replace the goals and means with anything. And unlike the retreatist, they do not want to withdraw and let others live in peace. Instead, they want to annihilate what exists and whoever stands in their way.

In Sum Strain theory underscores the sociological principle that deviants are the product of society. 

Mainstream social values (cultural goals and institutionalized means to reach those goals) can produce strain (frustration, dissatisfaction). 

People who feel this strain are more likely than others to take deviant (nonconforming) paths.