03 Section B Option 1, Key question 3 - Subcultural explanations of crime (part 4)

Cohen and status frustration

Subcultural explanations ask why particular forms of rule-breaking become meaningful and rewarding within a group.

Culture consists of shared meanings, values and ways of living. Values identify what people regard as desirable; norms are expectations about behaviour. Through socialisation, people learn these expectations from others, including peers. A subculture shares some features of the wider culture while having distinctive ones. Deviance means departing from social norms, whereas crime means breaking criminal law. A music community, for example, can have a distinctive style without breaking any law. Neither youth nor subculture means criminal gang.

In Delinquent Boys (1955), Albert Cohen developed a theoretical explanation of group delinquency among working-class boys in the United States. He argued that school judges pupils against middle-class standards of achievement and conduct. Boys who struggle to gain recognition on these terms may experience status frustration: resentment at being denied respect. Some develop a collective solution, reversing the standards that humiliate them. This reversal is reaction formation. Conduct condemned at school can earn admiration among peers. The group creates an alternative status system rather than merely supplying money.

Cohen described delinquency as sometimes non-utilitarian: it produces no immediate material gain. It may also be malicious, deliberately upsetting others, and negativistic, defined in opposition to conventional expectations. Non-utilitarian does not mean meaningless: an act can reward its performer with peer recognition. These are proposed features of an explanation, not findings from a representative survey of all working-class boys. Cohen and James Short's 1958 discussion treated subcultural propositions as open to further research and revision.

Consider this original illustration. Several pupils who receive little praise for schoolwork gain applause from friends by damaging a school display. The damage brings no saleable goods. Cohen's reasoning would connect the denial of school status to a shared standard in which defying the school demonstrates worth. The applause helps explain why the behaviour is collective. Simply saying “they are poor” misses both the meaning of the act and the group reward. Equally, observing damage alone would not establish that status frustration caused it: we would need evidence about the pupils' experiences and meanings.

Cloward and Ohlin's differential opportunity

Organised offending can require access to opportunities, skills and contacts as well as a reason to offend.

Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, in Delinquency and Opportunity (1960), extended the idea of strain: pressure arising when valued goals are difficult to achieve through approved means. Their distinctive argument is differential opportunity. Legitimate opportunities, such as qualifications and employment, are unequal, but so are illegitimate opportunities. Wanting illegal income does not give someone the skills, buyers or trusted contacts to obtain it. Their original discussion of illegitimate means stresses access to learning and performing criminal roles.

They distinguished three subcultural adaptations:

The US Office of Justice Programs' guide explains this typology. It describes theoretical types, not three exhaustive boxes into which every real group fits. Drug use, money-making and violence can coexist; addiction cannot simply be inferred to result from the theory's sequence.

An original comparison makes the causal claim clearer. Imagine two districts with similarly restricted legal employment. In one, established offenders teach younger recruits how to find buyers for stolen goods. In the other, young people have no such contacts, but peers admire winning fights. The theory predicts different adaptations because illegitimate opportunities and rewards differ, even if legal disadvantage is similar. This is more discriminating than predicting one uniform response to poverty.

There is also an important comparison with Cohen. Cohen highlights respect gained through reversing dominant standards; Cloward and Ohlin explain why the available response may involve organised profit, violence or retreat. Neither account establishes that every disadvantaged person offends. Comparing non-offenders facing similar barriers is necessary to explain why people take different paths.

Miller and focal concerns

An alternative cultural explanation treats offending as an attempt to meet local expectations rather than necessarily a response to failed middle-class ambitions.

Walter Miller's 1958 article argued that some adolescent street-corner offending expressed adherence to an existing lower-class culture. His term focal concerns means matters receiving sustained attention and emotional importance. He identified trouble, toughness, smartness, excitement, fate and autonomy. Toughness involves resilience and masculine strength; smartness includes being streetwise and avoiding being outwitted. Excitement concerns seeking stimulation, fate concerns the sense that outcomes depend on forces beyond one's control, and autonomy concerns resisting control. Concern with trouble can include avoiding it as well as risking it.

Miller's mechanism differs from Cohen's: locally valued conduct is learned through socialisation, then expressed or intensified within peer groups. In an original example, a boy may fight to avoid appearing weak before friends. Miller would ask whether he is fulfilling an established expectation of toughness; Cohen would ask whether the group's status system arose through reaction against denied conventional recognition. The observable act is the same, but the proposed origin of its meaning differs.

This is also a way to examine masculinity: socially learned expectations of what it means to be a man. It explains a possible connection between gender expectations and particular violence, rather than presenting violence as biologically inevitable. Toughness can also be expressed through demanding lawful work or sport. A cultural value alone does not make an offence inevitable.