Subcultural Theory vs. Strain Theory

Subcultural theory vs. strain theory examines the relationship between two closely related but analytically distinct traditions in criminological theory: Robert Merton’s original strain theory, which explains individual deviant adaptation as a response to the gap between culturally prescribed success goals and unequal access to legitimate means, and subcultural theory, which extends and substantially transforms Merton’s individual-level framework into an account of collective, group-based cultural adaptation. This article examines the theoretical relationship, points of convergence, and important distinctions between strain theory and subcultural theory within the broader Subcultural Theory tradition.

Introduction

Robert Merton’s 1938 formulation of strain theory, developed from Durkheimian anomie theory, proposed that American culture instills a widely shared aspiration toward monetary success while distributing access to the legitimate means of achieving that success, education and stable employment above all, unequally across social classes, producing a structural strain that individuals resolve through one of several possible adaptations, including conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion, with innovation, the pursuit of culturally approved goals through illegitimate means, representing Merton’s primary account of criminal deviance.

Merton’s framework operated substantially at the level of individual adaptation, explaining why a given individual, confronting blocked legitimate opportunity, might turn to crime as an innovative alternative means of pursuing the same culturally approved success goals shared across the society, without directly theorizing how or why such individual adaptations might cluster into organized, collective, group-transmitted subcultures with their own distinct values, status systems, and behavioral norms.

This article examines how Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin extended Merton’s individual-level strain framework into fully developed subcultural theories, identifies the key points of continuity and departure between strain theory and subcultural theory as analytically distinct frameworks, and considers general strain theory’s later reformulation of the strain tradition and its own relationship to subcultural explanations of crime.

Merton’s Original Strain Framework

Merton’s strain theory rested on a specifically American cultural diagnosis: that the culture uniquely and intensely emphasized monetary success as a goal applicable to all members of society regardless of starting position, while the actual structure of American society, through unequal access to quality education, stable employment, and other legitimate means, systematically denied many individuals, disproportionately those from lower-class backgrounds, a realistic opportunity to achieve that goal through approved channels (Merton, 1938).

Merton’s diagnosis drew explicitly on Emile Durkheim’s earlier concept of anomie, a state of normlessness Durkheim associated with periods of rapid social change in which established social regulation of individual aspiration breaks down, though Merton substantially reworked Durkheim’s original formulation by locating American anomie not in a general breakdown of social regulation but in a specific, chronic structural mismatch between a culturally universal success goal and a class-stratified system of legitimate means, a reformulation that gave Merton’s strain theory a considerably more sociologically precise and empirically testable structure than Durkheim’s broader concept had originally possessed (Durkheim, 1897; Merton, 1938).

This mismatch between universally instilled cultural goals and unequally distributed structural means, Merton argued, generated genuine psychological and social strain, a form of pressure toward deviant adaptation that operated most acutely among individuals who had fully internalized the success goal, making them unwilling simply to abandon or scale back their aspirations, while simultaneously experiencing blocked access to the legitimate means that most would-be successful strategies required.

Merton’s five modes of individual adaptation, conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion, described distinct individual responses to this strain, with innovation, retaining the culturally prescribed goal while adopting illegitimate means to pursue it, representing Merton’s primary criminological interest and the adaptation that subsequent subcultural theorists would build most directly upon in developing their own group-level frameworks (Merton, 1938; Agnew, 1992).

From Individual Strain to Collective Subcultural Formation

Albert Cohen’s central theoretical innovation was to relocate Merton’s individual-level strain mechanism into a specifically collective, group-based process, arguing that status frustration experienced by working-class boys against the school’s middle-class measuring rod was resolved not through isolated individual innovation but through a shared, mutually reinforced psychological process of reaction formation occurring simultaneously among similarly situated boys in continuous peer contact, producing a genuinely collective delinquent subculture rather than a scatter of independent individual adaptations (Cohen, 1955).

This move from individual to collective adaptation represents the single most important theoretical departure separating subcultural theory from Merton’s original strain framework: where Merton explained why a given individual might turn to crime, Cohen and subsequent subcultural theorists explained why entire groups of similarly situated individuals developed shared, stable, intergenerationally transmissible normative systems organized around specific delinquent values and status hierarchies, a phenomenon requiring theoretical resources, including reaction formation and differential association, that Merton’s original individual-level framework did not supply (Cohen, 1955; Cloward & Ohlin, 1960).

Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity theory extended this collective, group-level framework further by adding the concept of differential illegitimate opportunity structure, arguing that the specific type of delinquent subculture emerging in a given disadvantaged neighborhood, criminal, conflict, or retreatist, depended on the further structural question of whether that neighborhood possessed an organized illegitimate opportunity structure capable of offering youth a criminal apprenticeship, a synthesis of Merton’s strain theory with Sutherland’s differential association theory that neither Merton nor Sutherland had independently developed (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960).

The Debate Over Whether Cloward and Ohlin Were Strain Theorists

Francis Cullen’s influential reassessment directly questioned whether Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity theory should properly be classified as a strain theory at all, arguing that the theory’s emphasis on differential access to illegitimate opportunity structures represented a substantially independent contribution, closer in spirit to Sutherland’s differential association and social learning traditions, that had been somewhat artificially assimilated into the strain-theory category primarily because of the theory’s shared Mertonian vocabulary of blocked legitimate opportunity (Cullen, 1988).

Cullen argued that this classification question carried real theoretical stakes, since treating Cloward and Ohlin primarily as strain theorists risks obscuring the theory’s genuinely novel contribution regarding illegitimate opportunity structure, a contribution that operates independently of, and could in principle be combined with, strain mechanisms other than Merton’s original blocked-monetary-success formulation, suggesting that differential opportunity theory is better understood as a distinct synthesis occupying its own analytic space rather than as a straightforward extension or subtype of classical strain theory (Cullen, 1988).

This classificatory debate has practical implications for how contemporary textbooks and theoretical reviews organize the subcultural and strain traditions, with some treatments continuing to group Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin together under a shared strain-theory heading while others, following Cullen’s argument, present differential opportunity theory as a hybrid strain-and-differential-association synthesis meriting separate treatment from more purely strain-based accounts such as Cohen’s original status-frustration model (Cullen & Agnew, 2011).

Points of Convergence and Enduring Distinction

Despite these important theoretical departures, subcultural theory and strain theory remain closely related traditions sharing several core commitments: both locate the ultimate cause of crime in structurally produced blocked opportunity rather than in individual pathology or free rational choice, both retain Merton’s premise that culturally prescribed success goals are widely shared across the class structure even as legitimate means to achieve them are not, and both treat crime as a socially patterned, structurally explicable phenomenon rather than as randomly distributed individual deviance.

The key enduring distinction lies in the unit and mechanism of analysis: strain theory in its classical Mertonian form explains individual adaptation to blocked opportunity without requiring any collective, culturally transmitted subcultural formation, remaining theoretically compatible with a scenario in which many individuals independently innovate toward crime without ever developing a shared subculture, while subcultural theory specifically explains the additional, analytically distinct phenomenon of how and why blocked opportunity generates stable, collectively transmitted normative systems with their own internal status hierarchies and behavioral codes that persist and reproduce themselves across successive cohorts of youth.

This distinction has practical as well as theoretical significance: strain-based prevention approaches focus primarily on expanding individual access to legitimate opportunity, education, and employment, while subcultural theory’s prevention implications additionally emphasize disrupting or redirecting the collective status systems and peer transmission processes that, once established, can continue generating delinquent behavior even among individuals who might otherwise have limited need to innovate around blocked opportunity, since group loyalty, status, and peer pressure operate as independent motivational forces once a subculture has taken root (Cloward, 1959; Anderson, 1999).

General Strain Theory and Its Relationship to Subcultural Explanation

Robert Agnew’s general strain theory, developed in the early 1990s, substantially reformulated the strain tradition by expanding Merton’s narrow focus on blocked monetary success to encompass a broader range of strain sources, including the failure to achieve any personally valued goal, the removal of positively valued stimuli such as the loss of a relationship, and the presentation of negatively valued stimuli such as abuse or victimization, arguing that these varied sources of strain generate negative emotions, particularly anger, that in turn increase the likelihood of criminal or delinquent coping (Agnew, 1992).

General strain theory operates at a more explicitly individual, psychological level than classical subcultural theory, focusing on how specific strain experiences generate emotional states that predict individual offending, without requiring or directly theorizing the kind of stable, collectively transmitted subcultural formation central to Cohen’s and Cloward and Ohlin’s frameworks, though Agnew has acknowledged that repeated exposure to similar strains within a given community could plausibly contribute to the kind of shared adaptive orientation subcultural theorists describe, suggesting a point of potential theoretical integration rather than strict competition between the two traditions (Agnew, 1992, 2006).

Contemporary criminological theory increasingly treats general strain theory and subcultural theory as addressing complementary levels of explanation, with general strain theory illuminating the individual psychological and emotional pathway from strain experience to offending and subcultural theory illuminating how repeated, spatially concentrated strain experiences can crystallize into stable, group-transmitted normative systems that then exert their own independent causal influence on individual behavior beyond what any single individual’s strain experience alone would predict (Agnew, 2006; Anderson, 1999).

Conclusion

Strain theory and subcultural theory share a common Mertonian origin and a common structural diagnosis, that blocked access to legitimate means of achieving widely shared success goals generates pressure toward criminal adaptation, but they diverge on a fundamental analytical dimension: strain theory in its classical and general reformulations explains individual adaptation to blocked opportunity and strain, while subcultural theory explains the additional, collective phenomenon of how blocked opportunity crystallizes into stable, intergenerationally transmitted normative systems with independent causal force on group members’ behavior.

Cohen’s and Cloward and Ohlin’s foundational subcultural theories represent the historically primary bridge between these traditions, extending Merton’s individual-level mechanism into fully collective frameworks, while Agnew’s general strain theory represents a parallel, more recent reformulation of the individual-level strain tradition that contemporary scholarship increasingly treats as complementary to, rather than competing with, subcultural explanations of how and why criminal adaptations to strain become stable, group-based cultural phenomena.

References and Further Reading

Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30(1), 47-87.
Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Roxbury Publishing.
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton.
Bernard, T. J. (1984). Control criticisms of strain theories: An assessment of theoretical and empirical adequacy. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 21(4), 353-372.
Broidy, L., & Agnew, R. (1997). Gender and crime: A general strain theory perspective. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 34(3), 275-306.
Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24(2), 164-176.
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.
Cullen, F. T., & Agnew, R. (2011). Criminological theory: Past to present (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, E. (1897). Suicide: A study in sociology. Free Press.
Empey, L. T. (1967). Delinquency theory and recent research. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 4(1), 32-42.
Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. University of California Press.
Kobrin, S. (1951). The conflict of values in delinquency areas. American Sociological Review, 16(5), 653-661.
Kornhauser, R. R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency: An appraisal of analytic models. University of Chicago Press.
Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672-682.
Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure (Enlarged ed.). Free Press.
Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 5-19.
Passas, N., & Agnew, R. (Eds.). (1997). The future of anomie theory. Northeastern University Press.
Short, J. F., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1965). Group process and gang delinquency. University of Chicago Press.
Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. Alfred A. Knopf.