4/16/2024 0 Comments Structural functional theory crime![]() ![]() Merton’s strain theory was based on the idea that ‘success’ was an important cultural goal in modern societies – as Akers and Sellers (2004) argue, ‘Everyone is socialised to aspire toward high achievement and success… Worth is judged by material and monetary success’ – and deviance occurred when the cultural goals of individual behaviour could not be achieved using the structural means (such as paid work) for their realisation provided by the social system. While Durkheim saw a certain level of deviance as functional, he also argued that ‘too much crime’ damaged the collective conscience by creating ‘normative confusion’ or anomie – and while we have no objective way of measuring when ‘too much crime’ becomes dysfunctional, Merton (1938) developed the concept of anomie to explore how deviance was an individual response to problems at the structural level of society. If they did not respect those values there would be little point trying to justify their guilt. They deny, for example, personal responsibility (‘I was drunk…’), injury (‘no one was hurt’) or victimisation (‘they hit me first’) and by so doing show a commitment to conventional moral values. Matza found that, when caught, people employ techniques of neutralisation in an attempt to explain or justify their deviance. Matza’s (1964) study of juvenile delinquency provides empirical support for Durkheim’s basic argument when he suggests young people have little commitment to deviant (or ‘ subterranean’) values that threaten the moral consensus. Laws criminalising homosexuality in our society, for example, have gradually been abandoned in line with changing social attitudes. It is a social dynamicthat forces people to assess and reassess the nature of social statics(such as written laws). Popular alarm and outrage at criminal acts serve to draw people closer together ‘against a common enemy’.ĭeviance is also a mechanism for social change because it tests the boundaries of public tolerance and morality. ![]() In this respect, crime promotes social integrationand social solidarity through its ‘public naming and shaming’ function. The public condemnation of deviants, through media, for example, establishes and reinforces consensual boundaries. In complex societies, for example, the fact some people ‘break rules’ tells everyone where the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lie. Deviance contributed to social stability because when people act ‘as a group or society’ against deviants it becomes a mechanism through which the collective conscience is both recognised and affirmed. However, the existence of behavioural rules, in the shape of formal and informal norms, presupposes that some will break the rules, because if they didn’t, rules would be unnecessary.įor Durkheim, therefore, deviance was normal, by which he meant functional (as opposed to beneficial). ![]() The simple answer involves the notion of collective sentiments – shared beliefs about society and the development of behavioural rules designed to reinforce this collective consciousness. There’s also a little bit of subcultural stuff thrown-in for good measure.įunctionalist approaches are based around an understanding of how societies solve what Durkheim (1938) called two problems of existence: how to create order and maintain social stability in a situation where millions of unique individuals, each with their own particular (self) interests, must be persuaded to behave collectively. A short set of Notes covering a range of Functionalist explanations for crime and deviance, largely based around the concepts of anomie (both the Durkheimian and Mertonian interpretations) and Strain (Merton again plus Agnew’s General Strain Theory). ![]()
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