Chapter 7 - Subcultural Theories Flashcards
What is the Social Heritage?
- Dominance of middle-class values
- WWII aftermath
- Importance of education (military, educational benefits they got)
- Lack of attention to urban infrastructure
- Emergence of suburbs
- Civil Rights (access to education, veterans, women)
What is the Intellectual Heritage of Subculture theories?
- Work of Sutherland and Merton
- Academic research on social class
- Chicago School Gang Research
- Kobrin’s integrated urban communities of middle-class values (was the Chicago area project: relationship between male in lower class communities and the ties between political pyramid and organized crime)
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin
Their theory - differential opportunity theory
What is the concept of subculture?
- Smaller groups in society with the same values & different lifeways
- Can refer to gang subculture or lower-class subculture
- Can refer to any group not part of a dominant culture seen as different from a dominant culture
—-> Example. Criminals, Religion
What are the Middle-Class Standards Used in Schools?
- Ambition - get ahead
- Achieve long-range goals, delay gratification
- Take individual responsibility, self-reliance
- Manners, politeness, courtesy, world view
- Control of physical aggression
- Respect for the property of others (v. “mine”)
- Wholesome recreation
What is Reaction Formation?
- adaptation of own rules
- election to join one of the three subcultures - ex; the Corner boy, the college boy, or the delinquent boy
Corner, College & Delinquent Boy
Corner Boy
- Not a chronic delinquent
- engages in petty offences (ex; ttruancy, gambling and recreational drug abuse)
- becomes a stable member of the neighbourhood (ex; gets a menial job, marries and remains in the community)
College boy
- Embraces cultural and social values of the middle class. (works hard to achieve, but unsuccessful)
Delinquent Boy
- Adopts a set of norms that oppose middle-class values.
- resists family, school, and authority (to control their behaviours and join a gang because it is autonomous and independent)
What is the Intellectual Heritage of Subculture Theory?
Anomie theory
- added structured illegitimate means
DA
- explained how neighbourhood values get into place
Cloward felt existing theories were overly deterministic
The existing theory relied too much on strain - social pressure
- Asked what specific factors led certain people to commit certain acts of deviance.
- Felt social pressure alone does not cause a person to deviate (to commit white collar crime you need access to a white-collar job)
- His answer was that access to illegitimate means allows a person to deviate, given social pressure
What are Cloward’s Illegitimate Means?
Settings & Values support illegitimate means
Illegitimate means structures as legitimate ones
- More available to lower class than middle-class
Illegitimate vs. Legitimate Opportunities
Legitimate Opportunities
- members are middle and upper class who have primary access (structures, laws businesses, politics, zoning)
Illegitimate opportunities
- for poor, lower-class kids (organized crime, drug dealing networks)
What are the 3 ideal types of gang subcultures?
- Criminal subculture
- illegitimate opportunities, organized, and integrated
- profit making, little violence, respect for territory & traditions - Retreats Subculture
- integrated or nonintegrated communities
- primary focus on drugs
- double failure - Conflict subculture
- Nonintegrated
- focus on on getting respect
- gangs are unrestrained (violent)
What are the traits that assert masculinity?
- Trouble
- Toughness (a gun)
- Fate (pre-determined course of events, something is already going to happen)
- Smartness (street smart)
- Excitement
- Autonomy (your own state)
What is a middle class measuring rod?
set of standards that are difficult for the lower class child to attain
- example; sharing and respecting peoples property
What is Status Frustration?
solution is to change the way status is obtained
