Merton work can be seen to be the influence by the American dream provided that you work hard in a good job, money a good house and a luxurious lifestyle can be yours. However he said that when the values or culture goals are internalised, many people don’t live up to it or achieve it.
Merton presents five modes of adapting to strain caused by the restricted access to socially approved goals and means. He did not mean that everyone who was denied access to society's goals became deviant. Rather the response, or modes of adaptation, depends on the individual's attitudes toward cultural goals and the institutional means to attain them.
Conformity is the most common mode of adaptation. Individuals accept both the goals as well as the prescribed means for achieving those goals. Conformists will accept, though not always achieve, the goals of society and the means approved for achieving them. Individuals who adapt through.
Innovation accepts societal goals but have few legitimate means to achieve those goals, thus they innovate (design) their own means to get ahead. The means to get ahead may be through robbery, embezzlement or other such criminal acts. In Ritualism, the third adaptation, individuals abandon the goals they once believed to be within their reach and dedicate themselves to their current lifestyle. They play by the rules and have a daily safe routine.
Retreatism is the adaptation of those who give up not only the goals but also the means. They often retreat into the world of alcoholism and drug addiction. They escape into a non-productive, non-striving lifestyle. The final adaptation.
Rebellion occurs when the cultural goals and the legitimate means are rejected. Individuals create their own goals and their own means, by protest or revolutionary activity.
Merton was highly critical of competitive and ambitious social values in western society suggesting that competition and greed encourages people to break the law.
The critics of Merton theory is that some say that it neglect the power relation in the whole of the society Laurie Taylor suggest the Merton theory failed to explain who creates the rules in the first place, and in whose interests these rules and values have been developed by the powerful to guarantee success. By focusing on the actions of individuals he fails to recognise that subcultures developed their own goals and means of achieving them and this is a collective response.
Other American sociologist has taken the issues that Merton emphasises on deviance as individual responses. Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin, for example, understand deviance to be a collective solution by like-minded and like situated individuals to structurally imposed problems. This meant that deviance and especially delinquency is the result of groups being excluded from goals of society because of their position in the social structure usually a class position.
Cohen argues that although groups of working class youths may originally accept the wider social goals, their growing awareness of their inability to achieve goals leads to the development of status frustration, where the goals are rejected. Instead, new and deviant goals are formed and a delinquent subculture is formed. Cloward and Ohlin take these ideas further. They contend that as well a legitimate opportunities varying for the successful achievement of wider social goals. Illegitimate opportunities also differ. Thus, some young people are able to join a local gang or to take up a life of crime, but others lack even these choices. These individuals become double failureand usually retreat to a life of violence, drug abuse etc.
