Merton's Anomie, or Strain Theory

Merton drew on Durkheim's ideas to explain the crime problem in the United States, and specifically to explain a statistical pattern. The official figures, like those for England and Wales, show a marked discrepancy in criminality between the strata of society: a heavy criminal rate among the lower or working class and a low rate among the upper, moneyed or powerful classes. Whether Merton simply accepted the correctness of the official statistics is debatable, but he did accept that there was more crime committed by the lower classes than by any other sector, and it was that discrepancy he sought to explain.

Where Durkheim located anomie in the insatiable desires of human beings, Merton located it in a mismatch: anomie exists where desires and needs, though limited, still go beyond what can be satisfied in socially acceptable ways.

The two positions are close, but the difference is exact and examinable. For Durkheim the moral norms to be upheld regulate the individual's desires; for Merton they regulate the individual's willingness to use unacceptable means to achieve those desires. Society will not be anomic if its members use only legitimate means of advancement, even if their desires are totally unrestricted: it is the relationship between desires and the means of achieving them that is fundamental.

Second difference: Durkheim said the individual's desires are derived from within the person; in Merton's view the desires of individuals are largely defined by society. Each culture has different elements it considers worth striving for. In America and much of the Western world this is wealth and, through wealth, material possessions. Wealth is encouraged far beyond its own usefulness; great wealth is equated with personal value and worth; and those who lack money are looked down on even if they have other characteristics which other societies would value more.

Furthermore, Western culture and American culture in particular, far from limiting desires, actually encourages everyone to seek absolute wealth: everyone is told that further enrichment is possible and that they should strive for it, and those who do not are considered lazy and of less worth. Durkheim would have considered that this alone renders the culture anomic.

The healthy society lays down accepted means of achieving the goals. In Western cultures the means are supposed to be hard and honest toil, not theft and fraud — though the latter may well be more efficient. For society to remain healthy it is important that participating in the accepted means carries some reward, whether through systems of reward for conformity or through acknowledgement of any sacrifices made. The philosophy behind a healthy society might be: it is not whether you win that matters, it is how you play the game. If, on the other hand, the emphasis is on reaching goals with no control of how that is achieved, the society is anomic; the commonplace attitude then is that it is winning that matters, not how you play the game. The American Dream centres on wealth, and how the goal is reached has become unimportant, so that a person who achieves wealth through unacceptable or dubious means is still rewarded with prestige, power and social status. In such a society the regulatory norms are so undermined that many people either withdraw their support for the rules or withhold it and live by expediency, using whatever means, legal or not, are most likely to achieve their goals.

The strain. Criminality arises not simply from a discrepancy between goals and approved means, but because all members of the society are led to believe that there is equality of opportunity while sharp constraints on that purported equality exist in practice. The consequent feelings of unfairness can lead to criminality. Since the lower classes suffered most from educational and occupational discrimination, they were least likely to attain the American Dream through legitimate opportunity structures, and were most likely to escape low-paid and boring jobs by engaging in criminal activities. Anomie thus becomes the differential application of opportunity rather than of social controls or norms — which is why the theory is called a strain theory: the pressure to succeed exists, the means are absent, and the conflict or strain drives the individual towards a criminal way of achieving success. It is closely related to ideas of relative deprivation.

Merton used the interaction of desired goals and structural means to describe five types of reaction to the society in which one lives.

1. Conformity. Individuals accept both the societal goals and society's means of achieving them, even when they cannot or clearly will not achieve them. Because most people fall into this category, society remains basically stable and most people are not criminal. Merton's stress on this probably arose out of his general acceptance of the official statistics; in fact more criminality is committed by a much wider population base than is officially recorded, so the conformity category is smaller than he envisaged and even in stable communities may be a minority. Nonetheless, conformity to goals and means, even where it places individuals in a very unpleasant and undesirable position in society, is very common behaviour.

The other four are all categorised as deviant, though each is a very different reaction.

2. Innovation. The individual accepts social goals but rejects the legitimate means in favour of more effective ones. Most of the individuals in the criminal statistics fit here. Merton saw innovation as most common among lower-class Americans because they are stigmatised by low skill, low pay and greater vulnerability to unemployment; the frustrations generated may give rise to crime as a means whereby higher status can be reached more quickly. The typical crimes are property crimes such as theft and burglary, or organised crime where the sole end is financial gain.

3. Ritualism. The goals are abandoned but the means are almost compulsively adhered to. This covers many lower-middle-class Americans who abandoned any dreams of bettering their lot but still stick rigidly to the rules of society. It is questionable whether this is actually a deviant state; it certainly involves no criminality. Merton's answer was that because society sets the goals, a lack of desire to fulfil them is itself deviant, because it denies part of the culture.

4. Retreatism. The individual rejects both goals and means. Merton felt these people did not really belong to the society in which they lived, and included the vagrant or tramp, alcoholics and drug addicts, and possibly severely disadvantaged racial or religious minorities. Their deviance is negative: they reject the goals and the means but feel no desire to fight for new ones. The vagrant may commit public nuisance offences; alcoholics and addicts may offend while under the influence and may be driven to property offences to obtain the substances; members of minority backgrounds may simply retreat and become introspective, committing no crime but not contributing to society, which is unsociable but not criminally deviant.

5. Rebellion. Both goals and means are rejected, but rebellion also includes a desire to substitute new goals for the conventional ones. What is involved is a conscious rejection of accepted goals, often combined with a cause or an ideal to fight for; the deviance has a positive end often pursued by negative means. Here belong the street gang member, the terrorist and the freedom fighter. The typical crimes are destructive — wilful damage to property and public disorder — and may extend to murder, terrorist offences and any crime designed to attack the basis of the culture.

They are not mutually exclusive. People may react differently at different times in their lives or in different spheres. A person at work may be a dedicated achiever fitting the non-deviant role of conformity; in private that same individual may use drugs, a retreatist and necessarily criminal response; and in the public sphere he may fight for a political ideal, a rebellious response which may or may not involve criminality.

Messner and Rosenfeld argue that crime in America results from the culture of prioritising wealth, heavily supported by State institutions which give power to the economy. The cultural pull is the same as Merton's; the structural analysis differs. For them the State structure and the social institutions of family, health and education are designed to give strength to the economy, and Americans are socialised to back those structures as supports for the economy — so education is not prized as an end in itself, for learning or personal development, but merely as a means to better paid employment. Culture and institutions centre on money and set values which support the free market, encouraging people to use the most efficient means available to attain the desired goals: for most, the opportunities of the market economy are the approved and legal way; for some, the most efficient means may be criminal. The range runs from crude street crime such as armed robbery to more innovative forms such as insider dealing to defraud the stock market. Societies less focused on purely monetary values suffer less crime.

• Merton's own limitation. He stated that the theory is intended to explain only certain types of criminality, particularly street criminality — which explains, and partly excuses, its concentration on crimes exhibiting a lack of opportunity.
• The class confinement is unwarranted. There is no compelling reason to confine strain to the lower classes. Each corporate body has a goal, usually financial: high and ever-increasing profit. In a recession those goals are harder to achieve and the pressure to use unacceptable and criminal means is much stronger, producing tax evasion, VAT fraud and cost-cutting in relation to health and safety.
• Dependence on the official statistics. His basic theory was constructed to fit the statistics and the distribution of crime they showed; if the statistics understate middle-class and corporate crime, the theory is built on a distorted base.
• Ritualism is not deviance. The category involves no criminality at all, and its inclusion depends entirely on accepting Merton's premise that society sets the goals.

- Always give the five adaptations by name, in order, with the typical crimes of each. That is the answer to any question containing the word strain. - Contrast Durkheim and Merton in two lines: Durkheim says desires are natural and fixed, anomie arises from abrupt change, and a whole society is anomic; Merton says society sets both the desires and the means, anomie is endemic and can exist at any time in any society, and only parts of the society — those appearing in the official statistics — are anomic. - Use it on recession and unemployment. Merton's account of a recession is that people are told opportunities exist and are fairly administered; the message clashes with the experience of the unemployed, and while many accept their lot or give up their dreams, others become sufficiently disillusioned and frustrated for criminality to provide both a release and an achievement — especially if they view their failure as the fault of an unfair system rather than a reflection of their own ability. - Give the policy implications, which lie largely outside the criminal justice system: greater educational and job training opportunities; jobs with good wages and reasonable hours; cultural ideals focused on community and respect for humanity; and more weight to the obligations of citizenship, so far as these involve respect for others, alongside individual freedom and rights. </content>