Subcultural strain theories
- Created by: Victoria Prior
- Created on: 04-11-13 20:35
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- Subcultural Strain Theories
- Both Criticise but build on merton's theory.
- A.K. Cohen - Status Frustration
- Agrees that much deviance results from the lower classes' inability to achieve mainstream success goals by legitimate means.
- Criticism of Merton - Merton sees deviance as an indivdual response, ignoring the group deviance of delinquent subcultures.
- Criticism of Merton - He focuses on utilitarian crime fro material gain and ignores non -utilitarian crimes, which may have no economic move.
- WC boys face anomie in the MC education system.
- They are culturally deprived and lack the skills to achieve - leaving them at the bottom of the official status hierarchy.
- They suffer status frustration. Reject mainstream MC values and turn instead to others in the same situation and form a subculture.
- Alternative status hierarchy - subculture offers them an illegitimate opportunity structure for boys who have failed to achieve legitimately.
- Provides an alternative status hierrach where they can win status through delinquent actions.
- Its values are spite, malice, hostility and contempt for those who are outside it.
- Cloward and Ohlin: 3 subcultures
- 1. Criminal Subcultures - provide youths with an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime.
- Adult criminals can select and train those youths with the right abilities and provide them with opportunities on the criminal career ladder.
- 2. Conflict Subcultures - arise in areas of high population turnover that prevent a stable professional criminal network developing.
- Violence provides a release for frustration at blocked opportunities and an alternative source of status earned by winning 'turf' from rival gangs.
- 3. Retreatist Subcultures - 'double failures' who fil in both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures, often turn to a drop-out subculture based on illegal drug use.
- Unequal access to illegitimate opportunity strcutures - not everyone who fails at school can become a successful safecracker.
- EVALUATION
- Ignores crimes of the wealthy and the wider power structure, and over-predict the amount of WC crime. - TOO DETERMINISTIC.
- Try to explain different types of WC deviance ion terms of different subcultures unlike Cohen.
- Draw the boundaries too sharply between the different types - subcultures show characrteristics of often 'one type'
- 1. Criminal Subcultures - provide youths with an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime.
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