“How does social structure produce a strain toward anomie and deviant behaviour? Examine it with reference to Robert K. Merton’s contribution to this field of study.” (2000)
Robert K. Merton (“Social Structure and Anomie”, 1938; revised in Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957) gave sociology its first structural account of deviance. Deviance arises not from human impulses escaping social control, as Émile Durkheim implied, but from pressures that society itself generates. He called this strain toward anomie.
The strain mechanism
1. Culture–structure disjunction. The cultural structure prescribes goals and legitimate means. The social structure allocates real opportunities. Strain arises when the two do not match.
2. Unbalanced emphasis. American culture stressed monetary success with no final stopping point while giving far weaker emphasis to the means. When winning matters more than playing by the rules, actors choose the technically most efficient route, legal or not.
3. Class-differential access. The goal is universal but education, capital and contacts are not. Pressure therefore falls hardest on the lower strata, making innovation their most likely deviance.
4. Cumulative spread. Merton added in 1957 that successful rule-breakers erode the legitimacy of norms for those around them. Anomie then deepens beyond those originally blocked, and the strain becomes systemic.
5. Differentiated outcomes. Structural position shapes the adaptation chosen.
The strain is sharp in India. According to the India Employment Report 2024, the share of educated youth among unemployed youth rose from 35.2% (2000) to 65.7% (2022). Education, the approved means, no longer guarantees the promised goal.
Examining the claim against evidence
Support
- Joachim J. Savelsberg (1995) linked sharp crime rises in post-communist Europe to new market goals without matching opportunities: Poland’s recorded crime rose 69% between 1989 and 1990.
- Lance Hannon and James DeFronzo (1998), studying 406 US metropolitan counties, found that higher welfare provision went with lower crime, consistent with widened legitimate means reducing strain.
Challenges and refinements
- Crime of the powerful. Edwin H. Sutherland (address of 1939; White Collar Crime, 1949) found 547 adverse legal decisions against the 70 largest US corporations, crime by those who faced no blocked means. India’s bank frauds show the same: 23,953 cases worth ₹36,014 crore in 2024-25 (Reserve Bank of India), concentrated by value in loans, not petty theft. Limitless goals may strain the rich too, but Merton’s class-differential claim weakens.
- Robert Agnew (General Strain Theory, 1992) widened strain beyond blocked goals to loss of valued things and exposure to negative treatment. The link to crime runs through anger and other negative emotions, which explains why only some strained people deviate.
- Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (Crime and the American Dream, 1994) located strain in institutional imbalance: the market dominating family, school and polity. Their 1997 cross-national study found lower homicide rates where welfare decommodification restrained the market.
- Albert K. Cohen and Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin added subcultural and illegitimate-opportunity dimensions. Laurie Taylor asked who rigs the rules of the game.
Conclusion
Merton’s contribution was to show that a society’s own success ethic, combined with unequal opportunity, generates a patterned strain toward anomie. Evidence supports the mechanism but not his narrow focus on the lower classes. As refined by Agnew and institutional-anomie theorists, strain theory still explains why rapidly aspiring, unequal societies such as India see both street crime and crime in the suites.