Compare and evaluate Subcultural theory and labelling theory

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Nicci Waterfield                Sociology

Compare and evaluate Subcultural theory and labelling theory

And their perspectives on crime and deviance.

What makes people commit crime or deviance can be analyzed in many different ways, sociologists for many years have came up with many theories that they believe fits patterns of crime and deviance, the two that I am going to compare and discuss are the Subcultural theory and the labelling theory.  I will discuss each theory individually then I will compare them to each other to see what similarities they have to each other and if they contradict each other also if they differ, and also see if either of them actually work or play any relevance on today’s society.  

Subcultural theory

Albert Cohen in 1955, first developed the Subcultural theory of working class crime and deviance, he took his research from investigating delinquent gangs in low income, inner city areas.  Merton had previously wrote an article called, ‘Social structure and Anomie’, this concluded that people look towards developing a sense of the norm, of gaining the ‘the American dream’, but find that this is hard to reach with their own norms, so they reach a state of Anomie, a sense of normlessness where anything goes, they take on the attitudes and views of other people to gain ‘the American dream’ this making them feel Anomie.  Cohen agreed with Merton that people’s mainstream value of gaining success creates many problems for young working class males; many of them do not achieve well at school and therefore do not gain the skills and qualifications that they need to achieve success.  This makes the young working class males seen as failures by society, thus making them feel and experience status frustration, meaning that they are frustrated with their low status and see them selves as ‘losers’ also they receive low or none self respect within society.  As there are many young working class males in the same situation, they share the situation by making their own subculture, this is seen as a deviant solution, they adopt their own norms and values, and these do not fit into mainstream society.  Cohen’s own words say: - ‘The delinquent subculture takes its norms from the larger culture but turns them upside down’ (Cohen, A. (1955). Behaviour such as anti social and criminal are not accepted by society, but these are highly valued by the subculture, they can gain self respect by carrying out these within the subculture and also they can provide a way to solve the problem of status frustration that they gained by not succeeding well within normal society.  They succeed highly within the subculture by adopting the norms and values of the subculture and this gains them the self-respect, admiration and acceptance that they crave from their peers.  This develops collective deviance; they have gained status in the eyes of their peers.  Not only do they gain respect in the eyes of their peers, they are also hitting back at the society that saw them as failures and denied them the access to succeed, in the eyes of the young working class males they now have succeeded.

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Cloward and Ohlin (1961), argue that Merton and Cohen fail to explain why some subcultures have different norms and values, why do some only have their main concern as theft and others main concerns are violence, they developed the ideology that it depends on what social setting they have grown up in.  The social environment plays a big part in how they will develop their norms and values, by what opportunities they have, with this evidence Cloward and Ohlin identified three types of delinquent subcultures.  

  1. The criminal subculture, this subculture tends to develop in areas ...

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