Robert Merton's Contributions to the Sociology of Deviance

This paper assesses the theoretical and policy significance of one of Robert Merton's most influential contributions to modern sociology, the anomie or "strain" theory of deviant behavior. The enduring theoretical significance of strain theory lies in its sociological completeness. Strain theory preserves the interconnection between culture and social structure which is neglected or defined away by cultural and control theories of deviance. In its emphasis on socially structured contradictions in the relations of consumption, strain theory is also broadly consistent with and complements more conflict-oriented theories of crime and deviance. A major weakness of Merton's argument is its failure to clearly distinguish the etiological significance of the distribution of opportunities (mobility) and the distribution of outcomes (equality), which has led to misinterpretations of the policy implications of strain theory. Ironically, these problems are revealed through a kind of self-criticism that applies the basic tools of Mertonian functional analysis to strain theory. The paper concludes that, ambiguities notwithstanding, for purposes of theoretical integration and substantive insight, strain theory remains an important sociological perspective on deviance, especially when set in the context of Merton's broader sociological legacy.     

Alienation and Deviance: Strain Theory Reconsidered*

This paper proposes a way in which the concepts of alienation and anomie may be related in a single dimension of social experience and offers a refinement and expansion of traditional strain theories of deviance causation. It is argued that both alienated and anomic social actors seek a common goal–a sense of effective interaction with their environment; an experience of personal competence. Anomic persons are those who perceive the demands of primary roles as confusing and beyond their abilities and who respond by seeking to maximize certainty, security, and stability in social interaction. By contrast, alienated individuals are those who experience primary role requirements as simple but stifling and restrictive, bereft of meaningful challenges. These latter persons seek greater freedom and opportunities for creativity and self-expression. The ways in which deviance may emerge as these alienated persons adapt to the perceived discrepancy between their abilities and responsibilit ies are outlined and illustrated following the adaptive modes suggested by Merton for anomic persons.     

A Causal Model of Secondary Deviance: the Case of Homosexuality*

The causal structure of a theory of secondary deviance is fitted to data from a sample of 148 male homosexuals. The model suggests that if one perceives others reacting to him on the basis of the homosexual stereotype, his self definition may incorporate the stereotype. These responses, and the accompanied feelings of stigma, are likely to produce stress. As an adaptation, the individual may shift his reference associations to homosexual groups. While providing for a more positive identity, the ultimate outcome of these associations is often the adoption of a role consistent with the stereotype (i.e., secondary deviance). The basic concepts of the theory are operationally defined in terms of Likert-type scales. Dichotomizing the variables on the basis of median scale scores, a log-linear technique of causal inference is used to test the propositions. Offering support for the theory, the analysis suggests that secondary deviance is caused by association in homosexual groups which is caused by perceived societal rejection. Self definition is shown not to be related to secondary deviance, but is affected by perceived rejection and may affect and be affected by homosexual association. Implications for the labeling, anomie, and social and cultural support theories from which the model originated are also discussed.     

Disintegration, recognition, and violence: a theoretical perspective

The literature explaining deviance, criminality, or violence offers a broad spectrum of approaches in criminology and sociology. Mostly the theories focus on specific levels of explanation like the macrolevel (for example, strain theories) or the microlevel (for example, self-control theory).This article presents a relatively new theoretical approach combining different levels and focusing on three dimensions associated with specific kinds of recognition: social-structural, institutional, and socioemotional. The social-structural dimension refers to access to the functional systems of society and the accompanying recognition of position, status, and so on. The institutional dimension concentrates on the opportunity to participate in public affairs with the aim of getting moral recognition. The socioemotional dimension emphasizes the quantity and quality of integration in and social support from families, friends, partners, and so on, which provide emotional recognition.The underlying idea is that lack of access, participation, and belonging causes a lack of recognition. When this happens, social and individual problems increase. Thus, deviant and violent behavior can be seen as one potential reaction to a lack of recognition and as a way to gain status and recognition in a different manner (for example, with a delinquent peer group or other gang).     

GENDER, RELIGIOSITY, AND REACTIONS TO STRAIN AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS

Drawing on Broidy and Agnew's (1997 ) extension of general strain theory to explain gender differences in deviance and crime, we tested hypotheses explaining why women are more distressed than men, but less likely to commit deviance in reaction to strain. Applying structural equation modeling to analyze data from a national survey of African Americans, we find that African-American women are more distressed than men, but less likely to engage in interpersonal aggression, because they are better protected by religiosity's distress buffering as well as deviance-reducing effects, and more likely to experience self-directed distress (depression and anxiety) in response to strain, which is less likely to lead to other-directed deviance, like interpersonal aggression, than other-directed distress (anger).     

Bad Sports: Explaining Sport Related Deviance

While sometimes dismissed as an unimportant subject for analysis, the study of sport has offered important insights into our social world. Yet the academic study of sport‐related deviance has not kept pace with the explosion of popular media products regarding deviance in sport over the past four decades. This can be explained in part by the sheer diversity of sport related deviance which defies applying a singular theoretical explanation. A number of approaches from the sociology of sport and other social sciences offer useful ways of making sense of sport related rule‐breaking while also providing valuable insights into larger questions regarding crime and deviance. This paper reviews three contemporary perspectives used in the study of sport deviance: deviant overconformity, moral panics and consumptive deviance. Drawing from exemplary studies of performance‐enhancing drug use, hooligan violence, and sport celebrity scandals, I highlight the ways in which these perspectives offer a “sociological corrective” to media misrepresentations as well as insights that extend beyond sport and into contemporary social issues including race and gender relations, economic inequalities, crime, youth violence, and celebrity culture. I conclude by addressing new developments and avenues for future research.     

Emotions in criminological theory: Insights from social psychology

A number of scholars have noted that emotional processes have been undertheorized in criminology. Although criminologists have explored how various emotions facilitate or inhibit crime, few formal theories of crime clearly address the role of emotional processes. Sociological theories of emotions provide a number of insights that criminologists might find useful to help fill the gaps in criminological explanations of offending. We illustrate the utility of sociological theories of emotions to criminology by connecting three prominent criminological theories with complimentary social psychological theories of emotions. Specifically, we discuss how the power–status theory of emotions can clarify emotional responses to strain in general strain theory, how affect control theory can illuminate the emotions involved in identity adoption within labeling theory, and how interaction ritual chains theory can highlight emotional responses to coercion in differential coercion theory. Making connections to more clearly theorize emotions is critical to the advancement of criminological theory.     

Beyond Neighborhoods and Crime: Expanding the Scope of Social Disorganization to Explain Occupational Deviance

This article proposes a structural explanation for the occupational deviance dimension of white collar crime. The systemic model of social disorganization theory is used as a framework for understanding organizational conditions that produce high rates of occupational deviance. The model of workplace disorganization proposed here posits parallel mechanisms can be found in communities as well as organizations. Marginalized workplaces, employee turnover, and employee heterogeneity are antecedent factors that discourage employee network formation and collective action against deviance. By refocusing on organizational factors, we offer a broader understanding of occupational deviance, one that can predict and explain the workplace conditions under which counterproductive behaviors occur.     

Sex and Deviance: an Assessment of Major Sociological Variables*

This paper empirically examines the claim that many theories of deviance only have utility for explaining deviance committed by males because their conceptual development was tainted with inattention to females. Five variables representing the essence of major theories of deviant behavior are measured for a self-report sample of 1993 cases. Each variable is tested to determine how well it can account for deviance among females compared to males. In volume of deviance more males than females were classified as deviant but the underlying processes which the five theoretical variables address operated equally for members of both sexes. These findings support the position that the processes by which females come to commit deviance is similar to the processes for males. The findings suggest that exclusive focus on females is unlikely to yield more adequate explanations of female deviance.     

Round up the usual suspects: Crime,deviance, and the limits of constructionism

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the sociological study of deviance underwent a sharp break in orientation; many observers in the field began to shift their focus away from an examination of etiology to the study of social control. Examining the social construction of deviance and crime to the exclusion of crucial and unavoidable material features that cannot be defined away lead to certain conclusions that could not be sustained and were vulnerable to successful challenge from later approaches. The lives and work of Frank Tannenbaum, Jack Henry Abbott, and Alvin Gouldner, as well as the work of other labelists and Marxists, offer testimony to the limits of constructionism in the sociological study of deviance and crime.     

ADAPTING TO DEPRIVATION: AN EXAMINATION OF INFLATED EDUCATIONAL EXPECTATIONS

Many researchers argue that lower-class individuals adapt to their deprivation by lowering their aspirations for success. Data provide only limited support for this position, however, and suggest that many lower-class individuals continue to hold high aspirations. This article points to a second method of adapting to deprivation: raising expectations for success to inflated levels—levels that have a low probability of realization. The extent and determinants of inflated educational expectations are explored using data from a national, longitudinal survey of high school seniors. Results indicate that almost half of all deprived individuals with high aspirations have inflated expectations. The primary determinants of inflated expectations appear to be pressure to attend college and the overestimation of one's abilities. These data are relevant to anomie or strain theories of deviance and social structure and personality.     

The isolation of crime,law, and deviance from the core of sociology

The study of crime, law, and deviance is considered to be an isolated subarea of sociology that draws upon but does not contribute to the core of the discipline. Subareas, the specific and substantive topics of sociology, may be expected to make less obvious and direct contributions to the core than do theory, methodology, social organization, and social psychology as the major areas of sociology. And within subareas, studies that are readily applied may be considered less integrated and contributory to the discipline than the more “pure” or basic science subareas. This analysis examines the relationships between areas, subareas, and the core of sociology; the subject matter of sociological subareas; the actual versus perceptual isolation of crime, law, and deviance studies from the core; and the meaning of contribution. Measurement of contribution is limited to a survey ofSociological Abstracts, theCumulative Index of Sociology Journals, and the 1993 program for the American Sociological Association annual meetings. Comparing area and subarea publications and conference sessions suggests that, contrary to expectations, crime, law, and deviance research constitutes a significant portion of the available knowledge base. The perceived isolation of crime, law, and deviance from sociology may be explained by professional bias against applied studies of stigmatized populations. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 1992 American Sociological Association Annual Meetings.     

Durkheim's theories of deviance and suicide: a feminist reconsideration.

In The division of labor in society, Durkheim conceptualizes deviance as an essentially asocial phenomenon, and he conceptualizes "woman" as an essentially asocial being. Both theories contradict Durkkheim's characteristic social determinism, and both encounter, in Suicide, two further contradictions. First, Suicide demonstrates conclusively that relatively asocial individuals, women, are actually much less prone to deviance than relatively social individuals, men. Second, Suicide introduces the theory that deviance is an essentially social phenomenon that is produced by pathological social forces or "currents" rather than by "excessive individualization" and "insufficient socialization." Durkkheim's second theory of deviance thus simultaneously rescues his theory of the social nature of men and his theory of the asocial nature of women.     

Structural Strain in Science: Organizational Context,Career Stage,Discipline, and Role Composition

This article examines the relationship between structural strain (the imbalance between actual and preferred conditions of work) and anomie in science (the absence of opportunities to achieve recognition). Using data from a nationally representative survey of physicists and biologists in the United Kingdom (N  = 1,604), we test competing hypotheses about the occupational factors that produce structural strain. We find that structural strain is influenced by organizational context and career stage, but not in the manner existing theory suggests. We elaborate existing theoretical frameworks by showing that role composition mediates the effects of organizational context and career stage.     

Economic Dominance,the “American Dream,” and Homicide: A Cross‐National Test of Institutional Anomie Theory

This article presents a cross‐national test of Messner and Rosenfeld's (1994) institutional anomie theory. Drawing on multiple data sources, including the United Nations, World Bank, World Values Survey, and Heritage Foundation, we examine relationships between economic dominance, indicators of culture, and homicide among a sample of 50 nations. Additionally, we assess the thesis of “American exceptionalism,” a unique cultural complex implicated by Messner and Rosenfeld as a cause of high rates of serious crime in the United States. Results from OLS regression models provide mixed support for the theory. While none of the theoretical predictors exhibits a statistically significant direct effect on homicide, findings suggest that homicide occurs most often in countries where free‐market principles and practices drive the economy and where core cultural commitments are oriented toward achievement, individualism, fetishism of money, and universalism. However, contrary to expectations, the impact of a market‐driven economy is not more pronounced in countries with weakened non‐economic institutions, and results provide only limited evidence in support of the American exceptionalism thesis. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex‐related police crime, alcohol‐related police crime, drug‐related police crime, violence‐related police crime, and profit‐motivated police crime.     

Computer crime motives: Do we have it right?

Academic, legal and practitioner responses to cyber threats have been predominantly reactive, punitive, and deterrence-based, with limited attention given to the motives underlying computer criminals' behaviors. This paper reasons that new and better theoretical perspectives are needed to explain computer criminals' motives. Following a review of the computer crime behavioral literature, a summary review of core philosophies and theories used to explain generalized crime and criminal motives is provided. A framework is proposed suggesting that criminological theories have evolved along two categorical dimensions: determinism-indeterminism, and individualism-collectivism. The paper then reasons that future computer crime research will benefit by considering indeterminist-collectivist (constructivist) theories. Two such theories, social construction of technology, and actor-network theory, are proposed in the discussion section, along with some cybercrime examples. The paper invites a deeper consideration of the origins and motivations of computer-based criminality as a means of building stronger theory and ultimately advancing more proactive and effective solutions.     

The Network Structure of Crime

From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sciences be an important turning point in the study of crime and deviance, but only if taken as an opportunity to evaluate our core theoretical principles and consider new ways to understand and measure them. The goal of this essay is to take stock of the state of the field, while also providing a moment of pause to consider some fruitful ways of advancing this line of inquiry.     

Deviant Acts by Complex Organizations: Deviance and Social Control at the Organizational Level of Analysis1

The study of deviance and social control can be expanded to recognize that (1) organizations, not just individuals, commit deviant acts, and (2) other organizations have responsibilities for preventing or controlling that deviance. This paper focuses on these phenomena. It defines organizational deviance, applies Blau and Scot?s cui bono taxonomy to suggest types of organizational deviance, provides a categorization of controller organizations by the types of deviance they control, and considers the social control of organizational deviance. The paper concludes by suggesting that organizational deviance should be among the theoretical, empirical, and methodological interests of an increasing number of contemporary sociologists.