Cohen and Status Frustration
- Cohen agrees that deviance results from lower class’ inability to achieve mainstream success goals by legitimate means such as education. However, he criticises Merton’s explanation
- Merton looks at the individual response to strain, ignoring group deviance.
- Merton focuses on utilitarian crime for material gain e.g. theft and ignores non utilitarian crime e.g. assault and vandalism which usually have no economic motive.
- Cohen notes that working-class boys face anomie in the middle class education system.
- They are culturally deprived and lack the skills to achieve, leaving them at the bottom of the official status hierarchy.
- As a result, they suffer status frustration. They resolve this by rejecting mainstream middle class values and turn instead to others in the same situation, forming a subculture.
Alternative status hierarchy
- For Cohen, the subculture offer an illegitimate opportunity structure for boys who have failed to achieve legitimately.
- The subculture provides an alternative status hierarchy where they can win status through delinquent actions.
- Its values are spite, malice, hostility and contempt for those outside it. The subculture inverts (reverses) mainstream values.
Cloward and Ohlin: three subcultures
- Cloward and Ohlin agree with Merton that WC youths are denied legitimate opportunities to achieve and that their deviance stems from response to this
- They note that not everyone adapts to legitimate opportunities and some turn to drug use.
- In their view, the key reason for these difficulties isn’t unequal access to legitimate opportunities but also to illegitimate opportunities e.g. not everyone can safecrack.
- Different neighbourhoods provide different opportunities.
They identify three types of subculture that arise
- Criminal – provide youths with apprenticeship in utilitarian crime, usually established long ago
- Conflict – arise in areas with high population turnover and prevent stable criminal networks, violence produces a release and status is earned by taking ‘turf’ from rivals.
- Retreatist – ‘double failures’ who fail both legitimately and illegitimately, turn to drug abuse.
Evaluation of Cloward and Ohlin
- Like Merton and Cohen, they ignore the crimes of the wealthy and the wider power structure as well as over-predict the amount of working class crime.
- But, unlike Cohen they try to explain different types of working class deviance in terms of different subcultures.
- But, they draw to fine a line between the subcultures and many often show characteristics of more than one type.
- Like Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin’s is a reactive one, explain deviant subcultures as forming in reaction to the failure to achieve mainstream success goals. Wrongly assumes everyone starts with the same goals.