Writing in the mid 1950’s, Albert Cohen drew upon both Merton’s ideas of strain and also on the ethnographic ideas of the Chicago school of sociology. Cohen was particularly interested in the fact that much offending behaviour was not economically motivated, but simply done for the thrill of the act. This is as true today as it was in the 1950’s, for vandalism typically accounts for about 18% of current crime recorded by the British Crime Survey. According to Cohen, ‘lower-class’ boys strove to emulate middle-class values and aspirations, but lacked the means to attain success. This led to status frustration which is a sense of personal failure and inadequacy. The result was that they rejected those very values and patterns of ‘acceptable’ behaviour that they could not be successful within. He suggests that school is the key area for the playing out of this drama. Lower-class children are much more likely to fail and consequently feel humiliated. In an attempt to gain status they ‘invert’ traditional middle class values by behaving badly and engaging in a variety of anti-social behaviours. Cohen has been criticised as he fails to discuss females. Cohen fails to prove that school really is the key place where success and failure are demonstrated.
The idea of strain between goals and means was a relatively minor influence on Cohen, but it did have a very significant impact on the writings of Cloward and Ohlin, who owed much to the ideas of Merton. They argued that Merton had failed to appreciate that there was a parallel opportunity structure to the legal one called the illegitimate opportunity structure. By this they meant that for some subcultures in society a regular illegal career was available, with recognised illegal means of obtaining society’s goals. A good contemporary example of this is given in Hobbs book Bad Business. Hobbs interviews successful professional criminals and demonstrates how it is possible to have a career in crime, given the right connections and ‘qualities’. According to Cloward and Ohlin, the illegal opportunity structure had three possible adaptations or subcultures. The first was Criminal; this adaptation is where there is a thriving local criminal subculture, with successful role-models. Young offenders can ‘work their way up the ladder’ in the criminal hierarchy. Secondly was Conflict; here there is no local criminal subculture to provide a career opportunity. Groups brought up in this sort of environment are likely to turn to violence usually against other similar groups. Thirdly was Retreatist; this tends to be a more individual response and occurs where the individual has no opportunity or ability to engage in either of the other two subcultures. The result is a retreat into alcohol or drugs. Cloward and Ohlin’s work has been criticised as it also fails to discuss females. It is also difficult to accept that such a neat distinction into three clear categories occurs in real life.
In the late 1950’s Miller developed a rather different approach to explaining the values of crime when he suggested that deviancy was linked to the culture of lower-class males. Miller suggested that working-class males have six ‘focal concern’s that are likely to lead to delinquency. According to Miller, then, young lower-class males are pushed towards crime by the implicit values of their subculture. Miller suggests that the values of certain groups of the poor push them to behave in ways that were likely to confirm them in a life of poverty. Miller has been criticised for providing little evidence to show that there are specifically lower-class values.
Matza put these criticisms together to make a strong attack upon sub cultural theory. Matza argued that there were no distinctive sub cultural values, rather that all groups in society utilised a shared set of subterranean values. They key thing was that most of the time, most people control these deviant desires. They only rarely emerge, for example, at the annual office party, or a holiday abroad. But when they do emerge, we use techniques of neutralisation to provide justification for our deviant actions. The difference between a persistent offender and a law-abiding citizen is simply how often and in what circumstances the subterranean values emerge and are then justified by the techniques of neutralisation. Matza’s critique of subculture is quite devastating. He is saying that all of us share deviant, ‘sub cultural values’, and that it is not true that there are distinctive groups with their own values, different from the rest of us.
There are various similarities between the sub cultural theories. Both Merton and the majority of sub cultural theories argue that society gives us shared values and norms that we try to achieve. Matza in particular agrees with Merton’s belief that we all share the same values. Both Merton and Cloward and Ohlin attempt to explain crime and deviance by using sub categories. Cloward and Ohlin and Marxist sub cultural approach and Merton all define crime as a response to the gap between the goals society has set and our opportunities to achieve them.
There are various differences between the sub cultural theories. According to Merton we respond individually to the goals that society has set, while Cloward and Ohlin believe that we respond collectively in ‘subcultures’ or ‘groups’. Merton Bases his explanation of crime and deviance on economic motivation, while Cohen offers a different explanation that suggests status is more important for many young criminals. Merton states that we all share common goals of society, while Miller states that lower classes have their own norms and values that are very different from others. This includes ‘toughness’ and need for excitement. Merton does not explain where the goals in society that we strive to achieve have came from, while the Marxist sub cultural approach points to the existence of capitalism as the root cause.
Merton’s strain theory shares many similarities with some of the sub cultural approaches as those such as Cloward and Ohlin have used his work as a starting point for their own theory on crime and deviance. However, with these similarities come many differences on the definition of crime and its application in society, including the motivation for criminal and deviant activity.
