The Functionalist Tradition

The last lesson argued that deviance is a property of the response. This lesson turns to the other half of the account: why rule-breaking happens, and why some groups do more of it.

The functionalist tradition gives two answers that surprised people when they were first made, and that still do. The first is that deviance is normal — a feature of every society, not a symptom of a sick one. The second is that a society can generate rule-breaking through its ordinary, valued arrangements — that the pressure toward deviance can come from conformity to a society's central goals, not from rejecting them.

A society of saints, and the man who followed the rules too well.

Imagine a society of saints — Durkheim's thought experiment, and the fastest route into the tradition.

A perfect monastery, or a community of people so virtuous that no crime, in the ordinary sense, is ever committed. No theft, no violence, no fraud. By any normal standard, a society with zero deviance.

Durkheim's claim is that deviance would exist there anyway.

Because in a community of saints, the ordinary faults that pass unnoticed elsewhere — a moment of impatience, a small discourtesy, a lapse in devotion — would be treated with the horror that ordinary societies reserve for crimes. The threshold would simply move. What counts as scandalous is relative to the surrounding standard, and a society that eliminated its current deviance would find new deviance in behaviour it currently ignores.

Which means deviance is not a quantity a society could reduce to zero. It is a permanent feature, produced by the very existence of shared standards — because a shared standard requires a boundary, and a boundary requires things on the wrong side of it.

Now the second half of the story, which reverses the usual moral.

Consider a man who wants exactly what his society tells him to want — wealth, success, the visible signs of having made it. He has absorbed the goal completely; he is, in that sense, a perfect conformist. And the legitimate routes to it — the good job, the inheritance, the education, the connections — are closed to him (see 8.3.3).

What does a person who fully accepts the goal and cannot reach it legitimately do?

He may give up the goal. He may go through the motions without believing. Or he may pursue the goal by whatever means are available, including the illegitimate ones — and become, precisely because he wanted what he was supposed to want, a criminal.

Read the reversal carefully. This is not a person who rejected society's values. It is a person who accepted them too completely, in a structure that could not deliver them — and the deviance is produced by the gap between the goal and the means, not by any failure to be a good member of the society.

That gap is the engine of the tradition's most influential theory, and it is the finding this lesson turns on.

Two questions the tradition answers, and they are different.

Why does every society have deviance? — a question about the function of deviance in general.

Why do some groups produce more of it than others? — a question about the structural distribution of rule-breaking.

The functionalist tradition answers both, and the answers are the tradition's two enduring contributions — one about what deviance does, one about where it comes from.

And the tradition has a characteristic strength and a characteristic weakness, which this lesson has to hold together.

The strength: it locates the sources of deviance in social structure rather than in individual pathology, which was a genuine advance — it made deviance a sociological object rather than a psychological or moral one.

The weakness: it is functionalist (see 5.1.1), and functionalism's problems are its problems — the risk of explaining deviance by its consequences, and of predicting the wrong distribution of it. Where the theories predict well and where they predict wrongly is the substance of the lesson.

Durkheim: deviance is normal, and it does something

The claims, stated precisely, because they are easy to caricature.

Deviance is normal — present in every society, at every period, as a matter of fact. A society without deviance has never existed and could not, for the society-of-saints reason.

And deviance is functional — it does things a society needs. Four functions:

It clarifies boundaries. The punishment of an offender is a public statement of where the line is — a ritual that reaffirms the shared standard by dramatising its violation. The trial is a morality play whose real audience is the conforming majority.

It promotes solidarity. Shared outrage at a violation binds the outraged together (see 9.4.2 on the same mechanism in mourning). A community discovers what it holds in common by discovering what it condemns.

It permits change. Every innovation begins as a deviation. The reformer, the dissenter, the person who breaks a rule that later turns out to have been wrong — today's deviant is sometimes tomorrow's hero (see 10.1.1 on positive deviance). A society with no deviance would have no mechanism for revising its rules.

And it functions as a warning signal. A rise in deviance can indicate that something in the social structure has broken down — which connects to the second concept.

And Durkheim's second, darker concept: anomie.

Anomie is normlessness — a condition in which the norms that regulate desires and conduct have weakened or broken down (see 4.2.3). It arises in periods of rapid change, when old rules no longer fit and new ones have not formed, and — critically — when a society stimulates desires it cannot satisfy.

Durkheim's insight, which is genuinely counterintuitive, is that anomie can be produced by prosperity as well as by crisis. When aspirations are released — by a boom, by sudden mobility, by a culture of limitless want — and the means to satisfy them do not keep pace, the result is a chronic dissatisfaction that regulation would have prevented. His evidence was that suicide rose in economic booms as well as busts (see 4.2.4) — which no theory treating deviance as a product of deprivation alone can explain.

Two warnings this course must give.

The functionalist form is a real weakness (see 5.1.1). "Deviance persists because it performs functions" is not a mechanism — it does not explain how the functions cause the persistence, and it risks implying that deviance is good, which is not the claim. The claim is that deviance is normal and has consequences, some of which a society uses. That is defensible; the strong functional claim is not.

And "normal" does not mean "acceptable". Durkheim held that deviance is normal in the statistical and structural sense — always present — while also holding that societies rightly punish it. The two are consistent: a permanent feature can still be one a society acts against.

Merton: the gap between goals and means

Strain theory, which is the tradition's most influential single idea.

Merton took Durkheim's anomie and made it structural and specific. His argument (see 5.1.2) has two elements that every society possesses:

Culturally approved goals — what a society tells its members to want. In the case he analysed, material success, wealth, the signs of having made it.

And institutionalised means — the legitimate, approved routes to those goals: education, hard work, a career.

Strain arises when the goals are held out universally but the means are distributed unequally. A society that tells everyone to want success, while providing the routes to it only to some, generates a systematic pressure — strain — on those who have absorbed the goal and lack the means (see 8.3.3, 9.1.4 — the same structure, from the deviance side).

And people adapt to strain in five ways — Merton's famous typology, which is his lasting contribution.

Conformity: accept the goals, accept the means. The majority, most of the time, even under strain. Not everyone under strain deviates, and the theory has to explain who does and who does not — which is its main difficulty.

Innovation: accept the goals, reject or bypass the means. This is the crime of the strain theory — the person who wants the success and takes an illegitimate route to it. The man in the story.

Ritualism: abandon the goals, cling to the means. The person who has given up on success but follows every rule scrupulously — the over-conforming functionary, going through motions emptied of purpose (see 9.3.1 on goal displacement).

Retreatism: reject both. The dropout, the addict, the person who withdraws from the whole game.

And rebellion: reject both and substitute new goals and new means. The revolutionary, who does not merely fail to reach the society's goals but proposes to replace them (see Part 11 to come).

Why the typology endures. It explains why the same strain produces different outcomes — crime, empty conformity, withdrawal, revolt — depending on the adaptation. And it locates the crime not in the offender's rejection of society but in their acceptance of it, which is the tradition's most important and most misunderstood point.

And where strain theory predicts the wrong people — the criticism it has to answer.

Strain theory predicts that crime should be concentrated among those with the largest gap between goals and means — the poor who have absorbed the success goal. And a great deal of crime does fit this.

But three things do not.

Much crime is not instrumental. A large share of offending — vandalism, fighting, joyriding, minor drug use — is not a route to material success at all. It produces no wealth and is not aimed at any goal the theory recognises, which the subcultural tradition developed to address (below).

The powerful commit crime too (see 10.1.1). White-collar and corporate crime is committed by people who have reached the goals and have every legitimate means — which the gap theory cannot explain, because there is no gap. Merton acknowledged this and it remained a weakness.

And the theory over-predicts. If strain caused crime, far more of the strained population would offend than does. Most poor people, under the largest strain, conform — which means strain is at most a contributing pressure, not a sufficient cause, and the theory needs to explain the conformity as much as the deviance. This is 7.6.2's problem: a risk factor is not a cause, and most people exposed to the risk do not show the outcome.

The tradition's response was to specify who deviates and why — which is where the subcultural and opportunity theories come in.

The developments

Three that answered the difficulties, with their own evidence.

Subcultural theory addressed the non-instrumental crime the gap theory could not. The argument: working-class boys, judged by a "middle-class measuring rod" in school and failing by it (see 9.1.1), experience a loss of status — and some resolve it by inverting the values that condemned them, forming a subculture in which the despised qualities become the admired ones. The malice, the non-utility, the negativism of much delinquency is explained as a reaction-formation against a status system that had already rejected them — which is why the crime produces no profit: its point is not gain but the rejection of the standard that rejected them (see 9.1.1 on the boys who rejected the school and were delivered into subordination — the same finding, from the deviance side).

Opportunity theory added a crucial correction: illegitimate means are also unequally distributed. Not everyone who wants to commit a lucrative crime can — becoming a successful criminal requires access to criminal opportunities, skills, networks and markets, which are themselves structured (see 8.3.3 on networks). So the form deviance takes depends on the illegitimate opportunity structure available: a criminal subculture where organised crime offers a ladder, a conflict subculture of violence where it does not, a retreatist subculture of withdrawal for those who fail in both. This explains why similar strain produces different kinds of deviance in different places — which strain theory alone could not.

And control theory inverted the whole question, and it is the most empirically successful of the group. The others ask why people deviate. Control theory asks: given that deviance is often easy and rewarding, why does anyone conform? Its answer: because they are bonded to conventional society — through attachment to others whose opinion they value, commitment to conventional goals they would lose, involvement in conventional activity that leaves no time, and belief in the legitimacy of the rules. Deviance occurs when the bond weakens — and the prediction, which has held up well, is that weak social bonds predict offending across the whole population, not only among the strained. Control theory quietly won a great deal of the empirical argument, because its prediction is testable and travels beyond the poor.

Because the tradition established that deviance is structural and normal, and its failures taught the field exactly as much as its successes.

What survives, and it is substantial.

Deviance is normal — a feature of every society, produced by the existence of standards, not a symptom of breakdown. This reoriented the whole field away from treating the deviant as a defective individual.

Deviance can be produced by conformity to central goals, not only by their rejection — Merton's enduring insight, and the one that connects deviance directly to the inequality of Part 8. A society that universalises a goal and rations the means manufactures the pressure toward the deviance it then punishes.

The form deviance takes depends on the opportunity structure — legitimate and illegitimate — which is why the same pressure produces different outcomes in different places.

And the strongest predictor turned out to be the weakness of the bond to conventional life, which control theory established and which travels beyond any particular class.

What does not survive: the strong functional claim (deviance persists because it is useful — not a mechanism); the over-prediction (most strained people conform); and the class-bound focus that missed the deviance of the powerful.

Three questions to carry.

Is the deviance instrumental or expressive? The gap theories explain the first; the subcultural and control theories explain the second.

Does the explanation predict the right people? A theory that predicts crime among the strained must explain why most of the strained conform — and account for the crime of the unstrained powerful.

And is "function" doing real work or standing in for a mechanism? "Deviance performs a function" is a claim that needs a mechanism showing how the function produces the persistence — and usually the mechanism is the interesting part.

One closing observation that hands over to the next lesson. This tradition explains why people break rules. It says almost nothing about what happens after they are caught — and the labelling tradition argued that what happens after is where a great deal of the deviance is actually produced. The gap theory explains the first offence; the labelling theory explains the second, the third, and the career — and holding both is the synthesis 10.1.3 builds.

A society of saints would still have deviance — the threshold would move, and ordinary faults would be treated as scandals — which shows deviance is a permanent feature produced by the existence of shared standards, not a symptom of breakdown. And a man who accepts his society's success goal too completely, in a structure that denies him the legitimate means, becomes a criminal precisely by conforming to what he was told to want.

Durkheim: deviance is normal and functional — it clarifies boundaries (the trial as a morality play), promotes solidarity through shared outrage, permits change (today's deviant as tomorrow's reformer), and warns of structural breakdown. Anomie is normlessness, produced by rapid change and, counterintuitively, by prosperity that stimulates desires faster than it satisfies them — evidenced by suicide rising in booms as well as busts. But the strong functional claim is not a mechanism, and "normal" does not mean "acceptable".

Merton's strain theory makes this structural: culturally approved goals held out universally, institutionalised means distributed unequally, and strain on those who absorbed the goal and lack the means. Five adaptations: conformity, innovation (the crime — accepting goals, bypassing means), ritualism (empty rule-following), retreatism (rejecting both), and rebellion (substituting new goals and means). The typology endures because it explains why the same strain produces different outcomes, and locates crime in the acceptance of society's goals rather than their rejection.

Where strain predicts wrongly: much crime is expressive not instrumental; the powerful offend with no gap; and it over-predicts, since most of the strained conform — a risk factor is not a cause.

Three developments answered this. Subcultural theory explains non-instrumental crime as a reaction-formation against a status system that already rejected the offender. Opportunity theory adds that illegitimate means are also unequally distributed, so the opportunity structure determines the form deviance takes. And control theory inverts the question — why does anyone conform? — answering with the bond of attachment, commitment, involvement and belief, and predicting, successfully, that weak bonds predict offending across the whole population.

What survives: deviance is normal and structural, can be produced by conformity, takes forms set by opportunity, and is best predicted by the weakness of the conventional bond. What does not: the functional claim, the over-prediction, and the class-bound blindness to the deviance of the powerful.

Deviance as normal — Durkheim's claim that rule-breaking is a permanent feature of every society.

Functions of deviance — boundary clarification, solidarity, permitting change, and warning of breakdown.

Anomie — normlessness; produced by rapid change and by prosperity that outpaces regulation.

Strain — the pressure produced by universal goals and unequally distributed means.

Merton's adaptations — conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion.

Innovation — accepting the goals and bypassing the legitimate means; the crime of strain theory.

Reaction formation — the inversion of a status system's values by those it has rejected; the subcultural mechanism.

Illegitimate opportunity structure — the unequal distribution of criminal means that shapes the form deviance takes.

Control theory / the social bond — attachment, commitment, involvement and belief, whose weakening predicts deviance across the population.

Over-prediction — the problem that most people exposed to strain conform, so strain is a pressure and not a cause.

One — run the saints. Take a group you consider unusually well-behaved and ask what it treats as scandalous. The threshold will have moved to catch it.

Two — place five people. Take five people you know under some version of the goals-means gap and sort them into Merton's five adaptations. Most will be conformists, which is the theory's problem.

Three — sort a crime. Take one offence and decide whether it is instrumental or expressive. The two need different theories.

Four — invert the question. For one rule you keep, list what you would lose by breaking it — attachments, commitments, activities, beliefs. That is control theory's account of your conformity.

Five — find the unstrained offender. Identify one serious crime committed by someone with every legitimate means. Ask which theory in this lesson explains it — and note that the gap theories cannot.