subcultural theories

• merton - engange in deviant behaviour when they cannot achieve goals through conventional ways
• strain to anomie - strain creates pressure to be deviant
• american dream - culture of success and achieving goals - strain between the dream and achieving it
• adaptations to strain - conformity, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion, innovation
• conformity - working even harder legitimatly
• innovation - illegitamite aims such as fraud
• ritualism - give up on goals and stuck in w/c
• retreatism - rejecting illegitimate and legitimate aims and become drop outs
• rebellion - rebell against means of getting success
• merton crit - takes official stats at face value - ignores power of r/c to criminalise the poor - only accounts for utalitarian crimes and not violence or vandalism
• cohen - status frustration
• status frustration - w/c boys face anomie and lack the skills to achieve so turn to crime
• cohen criticises merton
• cohen says that subcultures are categorised by spite for anyone outside of the subculture
• crit of cohen - assumes w/c share the same goals as m/c
• 3 subcultures - criminal - conflict - retreatist
• criminal subculture - apprentiship for youths to start a career in crime - only occur in places where there is already a criminal heirarchy
• conflict - arise due to low social cohesion and a high pop turn over - high levels of disorganisation and illegitmate opportunities are the only ones avalible
• cloward and ohlin crit - ignore crimes of wealthy - miller argues w/c subcultures aim to achieve their own goals not mainstream ones
• retreatist subculture - results of being unsucessful in society and in conflict and criminal subcultures