Merton's Strain Theory

• Individuals are not entirely responsible for deviance, but society's unattainable demands can lead to deviant behavior.
• The idea that cultural goals are not accessible to all classes is referred to as a blocked opportunity structure.
• There are five modes of adaptation: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.
• Conformity is the most common adaptation, while retreatism is the least common.
• Structural strain theory is an extension of the functionalist perspective on deviance traces the origins of deviance to the tensions between cultural goals and the means to achieve them.
• Society may be set up in a way that encourages too much deviance, with a disjunction between socially approved means to success and cultural goals.
• Opportunity structure in a society is the distribution of people's access to occupations and other ways of supporting their lives and achieving goals, which plays a central role in Robert Merton's Theory of Deviance.
• Most societies include some degree of consensus over major values, such as those that define a "good life."
• If a culture promotes shared values that define people's goals, but the structure does not provide equal access to legitimate means for achieving those goals, higher levels of deviance will result.
• People will likely create innovative and illegal ways of achieving goals or rebel against the system to protest the unequal opportunity structure.

Key Terms

• Anomie is a breakdown of social norms caused by the disjunction between culturally approved goals and institutionalized means.
• Cultural goals constitutes the values and ends that a society encourages its members to pursue, such as success and wealth.
• Institutionalized means represents the socially approved methods for achieving cultural goals, including education and hard work.
• Malintegration refers to a lack of alignment between goals and means, which can lead to deviance.
• Adaptations represent the different ways individuals respond to the structure of goals and means, including conformity and innovation.
• Innovation is the acceptance of goals but rejection of accepted means, such as using crime to get rich.
• Ritualism is the following of rules obsessively even after abandoning the goals.
• Retreatism is giving up on both goals and means, for example, substance abuse.
• Rebellion is rejecting societal goals and means and replacing them with alternatives.
• Open-class ideology reflects the belief that anyone, regardless of class, can succeed if they work hard.
• Deinstitutionalization constitutes the weakening of rules and norms governing behavior.
• Utilitarianism (in context) represents a view Merton critiques: that individuals make rational calculations without being shaped by cultural norms.
• Deviant behavior is not simply due to unrestrained biological impulses.
• Certain aspects of social structure make deviance a normal response for some individuals, with conformity being the result of a utilitarian calculus or unreasoned condition.
• Merton's goal centered on discover how some social structures exert pressure, leading individuals in the society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct.
• Social and cultural structure has two components: culturally defined goals and institutional norms regulating acceptable modes of achievement.
• Culturally defined goals constitute aspirations that society encourages, integrated into individuals' lives with varying levels of emotional attachment, related to the "original drives of man" but not determined by them.
• Institutional norms define, regulate, and control the acceptable modes of achieving goals, including approved methods and norms (education and work), regulated morally and institutionally.
• Cultural malintegration occurs when goals are overemphasized and institutional means are devalued, leading to increased deviance.
• There are two extreme forms of malintegration, overemphasis on goals and overemphasis on means, like ritualism.
• For a stable society, people must derive satisfaction from achieving goals and following institutional rules.
• If means are ineffective or satisfaction from following them is low, deviance grows.
• Anomie is a state of normlessness, or a breakdown between goals and means. It occurs when success is everything, means are inaccessible or ineffective, and institutional controls weaken.
• Anomie and demoralization occurs when people can no longer support institutional norms for attaining cultural goals.
• The theory of anomie claims that deviance is caused by the discrepancy between the lack of legitimate means and the pursuit of success.

Merton's 5 Modes of Adaptation

• Conformity represents accepting both cultural goals and means, which is the most common and widely diffused adaptation, where examples include students, entrepreneurs, nurses, factory workers and immigrants.
• Innovation represents accepting goals and reject means, the least common and most associated with crime, where examples include drug dealers, students who cheat, white-collar criminals, hackers, and pyramid scheme operators.
• People internalize success goals but do not internalize moral restraints on how to get there, with inadequate socialization results in the innovation response whereby conflict and frustration are eliminated by relinquishing institutional means and retaining the success-aspiration.
• This often includes anti-social behavior that is called forth by certain conventional values of the culture AND by the class structure involving differential access to the approved opportunities for legitimate, prestige-bearing pursuit of cultural goals.
• Legitimate effort is limited by the fact that actual advance toward desired success-symbols through conventional channels, despite persisting open-class ideology.
• Ritualism comprises rejecting goals and clinging to means, when people give up on the idea of achieving societal success but still follow rules strictly.
• Extreme assimilation of institutional demand will lead to ritualism wherein the goal is dropped as beyond one's reach but conformity to the means persists, which include bureaucrats, government clerks, teachers, assembly line workers.
• Retreatism comprises rejecting both goals and means, when people adjust in this way are in society but not of it.
• People drop out of the societal race altogether neither striving for goals nor following rules, where examples include drug addicts, alcoholics, the homeless, and members of cults.
• Rebellion happens when one replaces both with new values and means.
• Individuals reject the existing social order and try to replace societal goals and means with new values and systems.
• Rebellion occurs when emancipation from the reigning standards, due to frustration or to marginalist perspectives, leads to the attempt to introduce a "new social order".
• Egalitarian ideology denies the existence of noncompeting groups and individuals in the pursuit of pecuniary success.
• Cultural goals and success-symbols are held in society to transcend class lines, not bound by them, yet actual social organization shows class differentials in accessing these common success-symbols.
• U.S. society promotes the idea that anyone can succeed; this ideology persists even if it is no longer true, used to justify inequality and prevent rebellion.
• Social class impacts access to legitimate means as lower-class individuals may be blocked from success via institutional paths.
• Pressure to succeed remains, leading to higher deviance rates, as seen in Chicago's vice areas, where organized crime flourished where cultural goals were strong, but legitimate means were absent.

Sociological Theory of Drug Addiction

• Lindesmith aimed to offer a universal, testable sociological explanation for opiate addiction that avoids moralism and psychopathology labels, focusing exclusively on opiate addiction.
• Lindesmith rejected the traditional psychiatric/personality-defect views which cast addicts as psychopaths, inferiors, and escapists, with little comparative data; Kolb's sample revealed that 14% of addicts had no prior defect.
• Lindesmith also rejected the moralistic causal slogans and purely pharmacological accounts.

Key Distinctions

• Physiological habituation: Mere tolerance and withdrawal potential after prolonged therapeutic dosing, where patients may quit without craving, if ignorant of distress cause.
• Addiction: Physiological tolerance plus a learned compulsion ("imperious desire") to use opiates to relieve withdrawal, involving a social-psychological component.
• "Hooked" refers to addict argot for reaching a point where withdrawal distress dictates continued use, synonymous with "addict".
• "Yen" is addict slang for both withdrawal symptoms and the craving they generate, highlighting fusion of physical & symbolic levels.
• Lindesmith's core hypothesis: addiction crystallizes once drug is consciously used to avoid or terminate withdrawal; craving, dose escalation, self-definition as "dope fiend" follow rapidly.
• Crucial case series: Lindesmith sites Strauss woman as an example of: Six-month therapeutic morphine leads to withdrawal without knowledge (no addiction); nine years later self-medicates grief with morphine, recognizes withdrawal, becomes addict.
• Effective safeguards (keeping the patient unaware of drug identity) work because they block formation of the interpretation.
• Lindesmith's work Bridges physiology and culture: bodily signals must be defined through social symbols to shape conduct.
• A significant symbol is the shared linguistic label linking withdrawal sensation to the "need for dope."
• Tolerance and withdrawal can be a precursor but craving emerges only via symbolic interpretation.
• Addict career a transition through casual use, becoming hooked, and identity re-definition leading to subcultural assimilation.