“What is Merton’s view of relationship between social structure and deviance? In what sense is a deviant also a conformist?” (2008)
Robert K. Merton (“Social Structure and Anomie”, 1938) reversed the older view that deviance springs from defective individuals. For him, deviance is produced by the same social structure that produces conformity. That is why, in a precise sense, most deviants remain conformists.
Social structure and deviance
- Society holds out cultural goals (success, measured in wealth) and prescribes institutionalised means (education, hard work).
- The class structure distributes access to those means unequally. Where goals are exalted for all but means are rationed, the norms governing means weaken. This is anomie.
- The result is structured pressure, heaviest on those with least access, which produces five adaptations: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion.
- Hence deviant behaviour can be as psychologically normal as conformist behaviour. Its rate varies with the structure, not with individual pathology.
In what sense is a deviant also a conformist?
1. Deviance is patterned by shared values. Merton’s sharpest formulation is: “A cardinal American virtue, ‘ambition,’ promotes a cardinal American vice, ‘deviant behavior.'” The deviant has absorbed society’s values too well. Deviance is over-conformity to goals, not their rejection.
2. The innovator conforms to the goal. He wants what everyone is taught to want and departs only on means. When Uttar Pradesh cancelled its police constable recruitment examination on 24 February 2024 after a paper leak, more than 48 lakh candidates had sat it. Buyers of leaked papers were not rejecting the value of a secure government job; they were chasing it harder than the rules allowed.
3. The ritualist conforms to the means. The official who follows every rule after abandoning ambition is outwardly the most conforming of all. His deviance is invisible because it takes the form of excessive conformity to norms.
4. Deviants often endorse the rules they break. Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza (“Techniques of Neutralization”, 1957) showed that offenders use techniques of neutralisation (“everyone does it”, “no one was really hurt”). They thereby affirm the norm while excusing their breach, which is partial conformity.
5. The rebel conforms to new norms. Rebellion rejects existing goals and means but demands strict conformity to an alternative code. E. V. Ramasamy “Periyar”‘s Self-Respect Movement (from 1925) promoted marriages without Brahmin priests or Sanskrit ritual, deviant by orthodox standards. Participants followed a new, rule-bound ceremony, and a 1967 Tamil Nadu amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act gave it legal validity. Yesterday’s deviance became today’s conformity, as Émile Durkheim anticipated.
6. Group context. In Merton’s reference-group terms, conformity to an outside group’s norms is deviance from one’s own. Subculture theorists add that a gang member deviates from society precisely by conforming to his peers.
Limits
- The argument presumes value consensus. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (The New Criminology, 1973) question whether the powerless share the goals of the powerful.
- Albert K. Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955) found delinquents who invert, not share, mainstream values.
Conclusion
For Merton, deviance and conformity are two faces of one cultural commitment. The deviant is deviant because he conforms, whether to goals, to means or to a new moral order. That insight moves policy from blaming individuals to closing the gap between what a society promises and what its structure delivers.