Anomie: Durkheim and Merton

The five adaptations. Learn these with the plus and minus signs; it is the clearest way to remember them.

Innovation is the criminologically important one. It is the adaptation of the person who has accepted the goal and cannot reach it by the permitted route, and it covers both the pickpocket and the finance director, which is why Merton's scheme is one of the few theories that reaches both ends of Module III.

Criticism

Of Durkheim. Anomie is difficult to measure, and calling crime normal and functional sits uneasily with the fact that a great deal of it is destructive.

Of Merton. He assumes a single dominant goal, which is doubtful in a plural society. He explains acquisitive crime well and expressive violence badly: a man who assaults his neighbour in a quarrel is not innovating towards material success. He explains the working-class offender better than the wealthy one, since strain should fall hardest on those furthest from the goal, and yet the wealthy also offend, which requires the additional argument that the goal is unlimited so that nobody feels he has enough. And he does not explain why one person in a strained position innovates while his brother conforms.

Of both. Neither says anything about how the goals were chosen, or in whose interest, which is the criticism the radical school makes.

Why the pair matters to this syllabus

For development and crime. Durkheim explains why rapid growth, and not only poverty, raises crime, and Merton explains the mechanism: growth advertises a standard of living faster than it distributes the means of reaching it.

For the causes module. Merton's strain is the most defensible form of the economic explanation of crime, and it is better than the crude claim that poverty causes crime because it predicts what actually happens, which is that offending tracks inequality and aspiration rather than absolute deprivation.

And for privileged class deviance. Innovation by those who already have much is Merton's own answer to the objection, and it connects directly to Sutherland.

A worked example

Two young men in a Mumbai suburb, both twenty-two, both with a degree from a small college and no connections.

Both share the goal. Advertising, cinema and the visible consumption of the city around them define success as a flat, a car and a certain standard of appearance. Merton's first element is satisfied.

The means are not equally available. Neither has the family capital, the coaching or the network that leads to the well-paid job.

Nilesh conforms. He takes a job as a delivery rider at a low wage and stays in it, deferring the goal.

Prasad innovates. He joins an operation that sells fake tickets online. He has accepted the goal exactly as Nilesh has, and has rejected the means.

Their neighbour Sameer ritualises. He is a clerk who long ago stopped believing he would rise, and now takes an exacting satisfaction in the correctness of his files.

And a fourth, Deepak, retreats into dependence and drops out of view.

What has explained what. The theory explains the range of adaptations available in that position, and it explains why acquisitive crime concentrates where aspiration is high and access is low. It does not explain why Prasad and not Nilesh, and Merton did not claim it would. That is the boundary of the theory and an answer should mark it.

Quick revision

• Durkheim: crime is normal and functional, marking boundaries and reinforcing solidarity; mechanical solidarity with repressive law gives way to organic solidarity with restitutive law; anomie is the deregulation of desire during rapid change, whether depression or sudden prosperity.
• Merton: anomie is the disjunction between culturally prescribed goals and institutionalised means, and the pressure it creates is strain.
• Five adaptations: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion. Innovation is the criminologically central one and covers both street and corporate acquisitive crime.
• Criticism: anomie is hard to measure; Merton assumes a single dominant goal, explains acquisitive better than expressive crime, explains the poor offender better than the rich, and cannot say which strained individual will innovate; and neither asks who chose the goals.
• Use: the best defensible economic explanation, predicting that offending tracks inequality and aspiration rather than absolute poverty.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish Durkheim's anomie from Merton's. Durkheim's anomie is a condition of the society: the weakening of the shared norms that regulate desire, occurring during rapid social change of either kind, so that appetites become unlimited and frustration follows. Merton's is a structural disjunction: the culture urges everyone towards prescribed goals while the social structure distributes the legitimate means of reaching them unequally, and the resulting pressure is called strain.

2. Set out Merton's five adaptations with their positions on goals and means. Conformity accepts both goals and means. Innovation accepts the goals and rejects the means, which is most acquisitive crime. Ritualism rejects or abandons the goals while adhering to the means. Retreatism rejects both and withdraws. Rebellion replaces both with new goals and new means.

3. Why is Merton's theory better than the claim that poverty causes crime? Because it predicts what is actually observed. If absolute poverty were the cause, the poorest societies and districts would have the most crime, and they do not. Merton's account predicts that offending will track the gap between aspiration and access, so it rises where wealth and poverty are visible to each other, which is what the evidence on inequality and crime shows, and it also accounts for offending by the wealthy, since the goal of material success has no upper limit.