Subcultural Theory vs. Social Learning Theory

Subcultural theory vs. social learning theory examines the relationship between two influential but analytically distinct criminological traditions: subcultural theory, which explains crime as the product of participation in coherent, structurally generated group value systems, and social learning theory, developed most fully by Ronald Akers from Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory, which explains crime through general learning mechanisms, including imitation and differential reinforcement, that operate independently of any specific subcultural content. This article examines the theoretical relationship, shared intellectual roots, and important distinctions between subcultural theory and social learning theory within the broader Subcultural Theory tradition.

Introduction

Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory, first fully articulated in the 1939 edition of his textbook Principles of Criminology, proposed that criminal behavior is learned through interaction with others, primarily within intimate personal groups, and that individuals become delinquent when they are exposed to an excess of definitions favorable to law violation relative to definitions unfavorable to it, a general learning-theoretic mechanism that Sutherland presented as applicable across all forms of crime rather than as specific to any particular class position or subcultural formation.

Ronald Akers substantially reformulated and extended Sutherland’s framework beginning in the 1960s through social learning theory, incorporating behavioral psychology’s principles of operant conditioning, including differential reinforcement and imitation, to specify more precisely the mechanisms through which criminal definitions, techniques, and behaviors are acquired, maintained, and extinguished through ongoing social interaction, producing a general theory of criminal learning intended to apply across social classes, offense types, and cultural contexts rather than one specific to lower-class delinquent subcultures.

This article traces the shared intellectual lineage connecting subcultural theory and social learning theory through Sutherland’s foundational differential association framework, examines Akers’s reformulation and its key theoretical departures from classical subcultural theory, and considers points of convergence and enduring distinction between the two traditions, including their differing treatment of group-level cultural coherence and their differing scope of application.

Sutherland’s Differential Association as Shared Foundation

Sutherland’s differential association theory supplied both subcultural theory and social learning theory with their foundational premise that criminal behavior, like conventional behavior, is learned through social interaction rather than through individual innovation, biological predisposition, or simple exposure to blocked opportunity alone, a premise that distinguished differential association sharply from Merton’s original strain framework, which did not require any specific learning mechanism to explain individual innovation toward crime (Sutherland, 1947).

Sutherland formalized this learning premise into nine specific propositions, including the claim that criminal behavior involves learning not only techniques of committing crime but also the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes favorable or unfavorable to law violation, and that a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law, a formulation precise enough to generate testable predictions while general enough to apply across virtually any form of criminal behavior rather than being tied to any single class position or offense type (Sutherland, 1947; Matsueda, 1988).

Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity theory drew directly and explicitly on Sutherland’s learning-theoretic framework, arguing that criminal competence itself, no less than legitimate occupational competence, required apprenticeship and access to criminal role models capable of teaching specific techniques, values, and justifications, a synthesis that positioned differential opportunity theory as already occupying a hybrid space between strain-based structural explanation and Sutherland’s learning-theoretic tradition (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960; Cullen, 1988).

Walter Miller’s lower-class culture theory similarly depended implicitly on a learning-theoretic mechanism, since Miller’s account required that adolescent boys acquire the six focal concerns through ordinary socialization within lower-class family and peer-group settings, a transmission process broadly consistent with Sutherland’s differential association framework even though Miller did not explicitly frame his theory in Sutherland’s terminology, illustrating how thoroughly Sutherland’s learning premise had been absorbed into subcultural theorizing by the late 1950s (Miller, 1958; Sutherland, 1947).

Akers’s Social Learning Reformulation

Ronald Akers, working initially with Robert Burgess, reformulated Sutherland’s differential association theory by explicitly incorporating operant conditioning principles from behavioral psychology, proposing that criminal behavior is acquired and maintained through four interrelated mechanisms: differential association with others who model and provide definitions favorable or unfavorable to crime; definitions, an individual’s own attitudes and rationalizations regarding the acceptability of criminal behavior; differential reinforcement, the actual and anticipated rewards and punishments following criminal behavior; and imitation, the direct modeling of others’ observed behavior (Akers, 1998).

This reformulation substantially generalized Sutherland’s original framework by specifying learning mechanisms, particularly differential reinforcement, that operate independently of any specific group’s cultural content, meaning that social learning theory in Akers’s formulation applies in principle to criminal learning within any social context, whether a lower-class delinquent gang, a middle-class white-collar setting, or an online community, without requiring the kind of historically specific, class-bound subcultural formation that Cohen’s, Cloward and Ohlin’s, and Miller’s classical theories had each described in detail.

Akers’s empirical research program tested social learning theory across a wide range of behaviors and populations, including adolescent substance use, adult criminal offending, and white-collar crime, generally finding substantial empirical support for the theory’s core propositions, particularly the predictive power of differential association and differential reinforcement, across populations and offense types considerably broader than the lower-class, urban, adolescent male populations that had anchored classical subcultural research (Akers, 1998; Akers & Jensen, 2006).

Key Theoretical Departures Between the Two Traditions

The most consequential distinction between subcultural theory and social learning theory concerns the unit and specificity of cultural content: classical subcultural theory describes historically and structurally specific value systems, Cohen’s status-inverted delinquent code, Cloward and Ohlin’s differentiated criminal, conflict, and retreatist subcultures, and Miller’s six focal concerns, each tied to particular structural conditions and offering a rich, substantively detailed account of what a given subculture actually values and why, while social learning theory in its general form specifies the mechanisms of criminal learning without committing to any particular substantive cultural content, applicable in principle to learning any set of criminal definitions regardless of their specific origin or content.

This difference in scope produces a corresponding difference in explanatory ambition: subcultural theory aims to explain why a specific, historically situated population develops a particular, substantively describable delinquent culture, while social learning theory aims to explain the general process by which criminal behavior of any kind is learned, a more modest and more broadly generalizable theoretical goal that has made social learning theory considerably easier to test empirically across diverse populations and offense types than the more historically and structurally specific classical subcultural theories.

Social learning theory also treats differential reinforcement as an independently significant mechanism operating continuously at the level of individual behavior, including moment-to-moment reward and punishment following specific acts, whereas classical subcultural theory generally operates at a more macro, group-level analysis focused on the origin and content of shared values rather than on the specific behavioral reinforcement contingencies operating on individual members within an already-formed subculture, a difference in analytical grain that has made the two traditions more complementary than directly competing in much contemporary criminological practice (Akers, 1998; Warr, 2002).

Empirical Comparison of Explanatory Power

Empirical studies designed to directly compare the predictive power of subcultural and social learning variables have generally found that social learning constructs, particularly differential association with delinquent peers and individual definitions favorable to law violation, predict individual-level offending with considerable consistency across studies and populations, a track record of replication that classical subcultural constructs, dependent on more historically specific and harder-to-operationalize measures such as status frustration or focal-concern endorsement, have not matched as consistently (Matsueda, 1988; Akers, 1998).

Ross Matsueda’s influential empirical work reformulating differential association theory in more precisely measurable, symbolic-interactionist terms demonstrated that peer associations and individually held definitions favorable to delinquency substantially mediate the relationship between structural variables, including family structure and neighborhood disadvantage, and individual delinquent behavior, providing empirical support for treating social learning mechanisms as the proximate causal pathway through which more distal subcultural and structural conditions actually translate into individual offending (Matsueda, 1988; Matsueda & Heimer, 1987).

This empirical pattern has reinforced the broader interpretive move within contemporary criminology, discussed further below, of treating social learning theory not as a rival replacement for subcultural theory but as specifying the proximate individual-level mechanism through which the more distal, structurally grounded conditions that subcultural theory identifies actually produce measurable individual behavior, a division of explanatory labor that leverages the comparative strengths of each tradition.

Integration and Contemporary Complementarity

Contemporary criminology increasingly treats subcultural theory and social learning theory as operating at complementary analytical levels rather than as competing explanations requiring a single choice between them, with subcultural theory illuminating why particular historically and structurally situated populations develop specific, substantively describable value systems and social learning theory illuminating the general mechanisms, differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and imitation, through which any individual member actually acquires and maintains that group’s specific criminal content (Akers, 1998; Warr, 2002).

Mark Warr’s research on companions in crime exemplifies this integrative approach, documenting through detailed peer-network analysis how specific mechanisms consistent with social learning theory, including exposure to delinquent peers and the specific structure and size of peer groups, operate within and help explain the peer-transmission processes that classical subcultural theorists including Miller and Cohen had described in less operationally precise terms, effectively supplying social learning theory’s more general mechanisms as the micro-level engine driving the macro-level subcultural transmission processes classical theory had documented (Warr, 2002).

This complementary integration has proven particularly productive in contemporary gang research, where researchers combine subcultural theory’s account of why gangs form and what specific status and value systems they develop with social learning theory’s more precise account of how individual members are recruited, socialized, and reinforced within an already-established gang subculture, an integration reflected in Thornberry and colleagues’ developmental gang research combining structural, subcultural, and social-learning elements into a single explanatory framework (Thornberry et al., 2003; Akers, 1998).

Conclusion

Subcultural theory and social learning theory share a common foundation in Sutherland’s differential association theory but diverge in scope and explanatory ambition: subcultural theory offers historically and structurally specific accounts of why particular populations develop distinct, substantively describable value systems, while social learning theory, particularly in Akers’s general reformulation, specifies the broadly applicable psychological mechanisms, differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and imitation, through which criminal behavior of any kind is learned and maintained regardless of its specific cultural content or origin.

Contemporary criminology increasingly treats these traditions as complementary rather than competing, with subcultural theory explaining the macro-level origin and content of specific criminal value systems and social learning theory explaining the micro-level mechanisms through which individuals within those systems actually acquire and sustain criminal behavior, an integration that has proven especially productive in contemporary gang research combining structural, subcultural, and learning-theoretic elements into unified explanatory frameworks.

References and Further Reading

Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Northeastern University Press.
Akers, R. L., & Jensen, G. F. (Eds.). (2006). Social learning theory and the explanation of crime. Transaction Publishers.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.
Burgess, R. L., & Akers, R. L. (1966). A differential association-reinforcement theory of criminal behavior. Social Problems, 14(2), 128-147.
Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. Free Press.
Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Free Press.
Cullen, F. T. (1988). Were Cloward and Ohlin strain theorists? Delinquency and opportunity revisited. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25(3), 214-241.
Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Ageton, S. S. (1985). Explaining delinquency and drug use. Sage Publications.
Esbensen, F.-A., & Huizinga, D. (1993). Gangs, drugs, and delinquency in a survey of urban youth. Criminology, 31(4), 565-589.
Haynie, D. L. (2001). Delinquent peers revisited: Does network structure matter? American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), 1013-1057.
Krohn, M. D. (1999). Social learning theory: The continuing development of a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 3(4), 462-476.
Matsueda, R. L. (1988). The current state of differential association theory. Crime & Delinquency, 34(3), 277-306.
Matsueda, R. L., & Heimer, K. (1987). Race, family structure, and delinquency: A test of differential association and social control theories. American Sociological Review, 52(6), 826-840.
Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672-682.
Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 5-19.
Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
Thornberry, T. P., Krohn, M. D., Lizotte, A. J., Smith, C. A., & Tobin, K. (2003). Gangs and delinquency in developmental perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Warr, M. (1996). Organization and instigation in delinquent groups. Criminology, 34(1), 11-37.
Warr, M. (2002). Companions in crime: The social aspects of criminal conduct. Cambridge University Press.
Winfree, L. T., Backstrom, T. V., & Mays, G. L. (1994). Social learning theory, self-reported delinquency, and youth gangs. Youth & Society, 26(2), 147-177.
Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence: Towards an integrated theory in criminology. Tavistock.