“How, according to Merton, are deviant subcultures generated?” (2019)
For Robert K. Merton, deviant subcultures are not the work of abnormal individuals. They grow out of structural strain, a society’s uneven supply of legitimate means for goals everyone is taught to pursue. “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938) described individual adaptations. Merton’s later restatements in Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), and the scholars who extended his work, recognised that people sharing the same strain can reach collective solutions, which become subcultures.
Step 1: a shared structural problem
- The culture stresses success goals (wealth, status) far more than the institutionalised means of reaching them.
- Access to those means is patterned by class, locality, caste and education. Strain is therefore concentrated in particular social locations, not scattered at random.
Step 2: deviant adaptations
- Innovation keeps the goal and rejects legitimate means, as in property crime and fraud.
- Retreatism abandons both goals and means, as in drug-using groups.
- Rebellion replaces both with new goals and means, as in radical movements.
- Conformity stays the usual response; deviant ones become probable where strain concentrates.
Step 3: from individual adaptation to subculture
- Individuals in the same position interact, recognise a common predicament and validate each other’s departure from norms, which reduces guilt.
- The group develops its own norms, argot, status rankings and role models. Deviance is then practised as conformity to the group.
- The pattern is transmitted to newcomers, so it outlives the strain that created it.
Extensions within the strain tradition
- Albert K. Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955): working-class boys judged by middle-class standards at school suffer status frustration. They reverse those standards and form a delinquent subculture that honours toughness, malice and non-utilitarian offences such as vandalism.
- Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin (Delinquency and Opportunity, 1960) added the illegitimate opportunity structure:
- criminal subcultures where organised adult crime offers apprenticeship;
- conflict subcultures where neither ladder exists, so violence becomes a source of prestige;
- retreatist subcultures for “double failures” in both structures.
Indian illustrations
- Criminal subculture: Jamtara in Jharkhand and Nuh in Haryana became hubs of phone and online fraud. In April 2023 over 5,000 police raided 14 Nuh villages; most of those held had studied only up to Class XII. A 2026 study of Jamtara fraudsters found poverty and unemployment as drivers, “crash courses” from experienced offenders, family-run operations, and fraud earnings bringing local respect. This is Cloward and Ohlin’s learning environment in a digital form.
- Conflict subculture: in January 2026 Haryana Police had 67 songs removed from streaming platforms for glamorising gangsters, and said gangs use social media to recruit youth. Prestige through violence is offered to young men whose legitimate routes feel blocked.
Critical assessment
- David Matza (Delinquency and Drift, 1964): most delinquents accept mainstream values and drift in and out of deviance using techniques of neutralisation. Tightly bounded subcultures are rarer than the theory implies.
- Walter B. Miller (1958): lower-class “focal concerns” such as toughness and excitement are a long-standing culture, not a reaction to blocked goals.
- Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals, 1976): youth subcultures are symbolic resistance to class domination, not merely failure. Angela McRobbie showed that the tradition largely ignored girls.
- Labelling theorists add that policing and stigma harden a subculture.
Conclusion
Merton’s answer is that deviant subcultures are structurally generated and socially sustained. Strain supplies the motive, interaction supplies the solution, and local opportunity decides its form. India’s fraud hubs show that the model still works. They also show that the remedy lies in widening legitimate opportunity, not only in raids.