Mertons Strain Theory
- Created by: MeganDuffield
- Created on: 19-06-15 09:31
View mindmap
- Mertons Strain Theory
- Description
- Containes two different factors, structural and cultural.
- Structural
- Societies unequal oppotunity structure.
- Cultural Factors
- The strong emphysis on sucess goals and the weeker emphysis on using legitimate means to achieve them.
- Structural
- Devience is the result of strain between two things.
- The Goals that a culture encorages indeviduaks to acieve.
- What the institutional structure of societiey allows them to acieve legitimatly.
- The Anomic Paradigm
- Conformity
- Accept the culturally aproved goals and strive to achieve them legitimally.
- Innovation
- Accept the goal of money sucess, however being blocked from this leads to devience.
- Ritualism
- Indeviduals give up trying to achieve the goals but have internalised the legitimate means and so follow the rules for their own sake.
- Retreatism
- Indeviduals reject both the goals and the legitimate means and become drop outs.
- Rebellion
- Indeviduals reject the existing societies goals and means but they replace them with new ones and desire to bring about recvelutionarry change.
- Conformity
- Containes two different factors, structural and cultural.
- Evaluation
- Advantages
- He can explain different patterns of devience shown in the official crime statistics.
- He shows how both normal and devient behavour arises from the main mainstream goals.
- Disadvantages
- It assumes there is value consensus that everyone strives for money sucess and ignores the posibility that some may not sare this goal.
- It takes oficial crime statistics at face value. These represent working class crime so Murton sees it as mainly a working class phonominon. Also too deterministic as the working class experience the most straun yet they dont all deviate
- Marxist argue that it requires the power of the ruling class to make and enforce laws in ways that criminalise the poor but no the rich.
- It only accounts fir utilitarian crime for moneytatry gain and not crimes of violence or vandalism. It also cannot explain crimes such as genocide or tourture.
- Advantages
- Examples
- The American dream
- Value money sucess which is the matierial wealth and the high status that goes with it.
- They believe that society is meritocratic and everyone has equil oppotunities.
- The reality is different: Disadvantaged groups are denied oppotunities which results in strain between the cultural goal and the oppotunities to achieve which creates frustration and therefore devience to try get to this goal.
- The American dream
- Description
Comments
No comments have yet been made