Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Functionalism
Durkheim (F)
Functional because:
Reaffirms the boundaries
Allows social change when needed e.g
?????
Suffragette movement
Strengthens social cohesion e.g.????
Terrorist attacks
Minor crime acts as a safety valve,
prevents more serious crime
For Durkheim
Too much crime results in Anomie.
Too little means no social change
Eval in groups
Eval:
fails to explain why crime emerged.
Some crimes are dysfunctional
Marxism ignores power
Feminism -
5 responses in society
1st is that a person achieves the accepted
goals of society in acceptable ways
This suggests the remaining responses are
the result of non achievement
Activity Page 30
Eval in groups
Eval.
Merton does try to explain lower class
crime however fails to explain, why
there are different crimes/not crimes
for gain e.g
What about white collar crime?
Valier (2001) Questions the extent of
shared, common goals in society e.g
Support:
For Sumner, Merton is right crime is the
result of disillusionment with capitalist
goals.
Plus Jock Youngs study, The Vertigo of
Late Modernity 2009
Handout
Right Realism
Wilson (1975) suggests that criminals
make rational decisions whether to
commit crime or not
Will they get caught
Are the rewards worth the
punishment
Murray 1990
State handouts
devalued education,
discouraged work and
marriage, encouraged
teenage pregnancy and
undermined parental
authority.
Subcultural theories
Albert Cohen (1955) (response to critique of
Merton) W/C boys experience Status
frustration and develop their own subculture as a solution.
Pitts study Handout
Eval
Ignores police stereotyping
Ignores females
Critique
Masculinity
Messerschmidt (1993). Male identity.
Being a male in British society involves
material, social & sexual success = males
committing crime.
Connells work also here & the
hegemonic male
Althusser
the law is an
ideological state apparatus
concerned with:
Eval
Eval
Neo Marxist critiques of traditional
Marxism as too deterministic
Traditional W/C are
passive victims of an
unequal capitalist system
Neo people have free will
and make choices about
how they react to their
experiences.
Evaluation
No woman in any of the analysis
Not all sub-cultural groups are developed out
of a protest to capitalism
Interactionism
Suggest most are capable of committing a
crime.
Therefore little point searching for causes
of crime
We should try to understand the reaction
to & definition of, acts.
Thus definitions are down to social
interaction
Relative
Definitions vary (relative) depending on:
Time, place, society
e.g.
Youngs study of cannabis smokers in
Notting Hill (1971) & deviancy
amplification
Study in support
Cicourels study (1976) the police/courts
view on what a typical delinquent is, is
why more males, W/C, some ethnic
minorities feature in the statistics,
Griffiths here also
Thus the statistics are flawed, they are
socially constructed.
video
Evaluation
Does look at the process of labelling
However
Fails to look at why some people commit
crime in the first place.
Fails to look at who has the power to
make rules (Marxist & feminist, Hall
here).
Fail to look at why some reject the label
(too deterministic) Ackers 1975
Eval cont.
McRobbie & Thornton (1995) suggest
greater care is taken before starting a moral
panic. E.G. politicians who get caught out.
US governor of NY Spitzer
Thornton (1995) argues people are reflexive
that they have a range of reactions and
actively use the media to create society.
Blogs/ internet