Toonies was not a functionalist but he was a supporter of Durkheim. He had the theories of Gemeinshaft (community) and Gesselleshaft (society). He believed that prior to industrialisation peoples were part of smaller communities and there were higher stronger sanctions against crime and deviance. Now there is just society as a whole and the sanctions are less strong.
Robert Merton was another functionalist; he also thought that deviance was a product of the form of culture and the structure of society. His theory was that society has institutionalised goals that we should all be aiming for, however there are individual who may not be in to position or have the ability or achieve these goals so they perform deviant acts to reach them. There are different responses to the cultural goals. Innovation is when individuals accept the goals but they “break” the rules to achieve them. It is also seen as deviant to not to accept the goals at all – retreatism. Some people are happy to accept they will never reach the goals and choose not to strive for them.
Marxists also look at society as a whole however unlike Marxists they see crime and deviance as indicators of class conflict. They believe that the manipulation of values is supported by the superstructure of society that keeps social order. This is seen in law creation and law enforcement. The laws favour the middle class and when it is enforced it is mostly applied to the ethnic minorities and the working class.
This is why traditional Marxists say that the statistics on crime and deviance are distorted as they only record the crime that they are looking for. Middle class crime or white collar crime like tax fraud and fiddling tends to be over looked. It is a fact that street crime is more likely to be pursued and even when white collar crime is exposed it is less likely to be reported. Durkheim said that that law reflects the will of the people but Marxist says that it reflects the will of the powerful. The middle class are also more beneficial by the law as they are the ones creating the law and the ones enforcing it.
Marxists also see crime as a good thing; they state that it leads society to change. This is linked to historical materialism – when society changed from traditional to fudal to ancient and to today’s communist society. Crime is seen as good as it helps society to change from one stage to the next.
Left realism feel that the statistics on crime are correct and most offences are committed by the working class but the reason for the high crime rate among the working class is relative depravation. This means that the working class are necessarily poor however they see things that their neighbours may have which they do not have so they feel deprived compared to them, which may mean they result to crime to achieve getting them. This relates back to Marxists innovation theory.
The third macro approach is the sub-cultural or structural approach. From a structural approach Cowan criticised Merton and said that the functionalists are wrong. He claimed that crime is not always about reaching goals and that it can be non Utilitarian which means there is no money or possessions to be gained from committing the crime or deviant act. Some people may feel that they cannot achieve the goals of society so they create their own. So crime and deviance is a response to goals but not institutional goals to get material possessions. Crime is used to gain higher statuses with groups, Cowan argues that the groups most involved in crime suffer from status frustration therefore they achieve their status in their own sub-cultural groups by being successful in their own sub-cultural goals.
Cloward and Ohlian say the crime and deviance originates because of situational constraints so it is a response from people who live in the inner cities where crime rates are the highest. The constraints lead to situational errors. Groups own career paths in crime which is a part of their subculture. They choose this sub-cultural career path as they don’t see anywhere else they can escalate in the hierarchy to get a better position in society.
The interactionist (micro) approach views deviance from a different theoretical perspective, its more concerned with understanding the motives and the meanings of crime and deviance. Micro approaches tend to look at the groups themselves and want to find the root or the cause. Howard S. suggested that there is no such thing as a deviant act and it only becomes deviant when others define it as deviant. Becker finds Deviance to be a product of a label. For example if people see an individual to being deviant an a misfit they may respond to the label an live up to it as that’s what is expected of them. Therefore Becker argues that “deviance is not a quality that lies in behaviour itself, nut in the interaction between the person who commits the act and those who respond to it.”
Becker is more concerned with how labels influence crime and deviance and its responses, not with the whole of society. So from the interactionist perspective deviance is produced by a process of interaction between the potential deviant and the agents of social control. The macro holistic approaches just look at the social control.
