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Functionalism is a consensus structuralist perspective that views society as a system of interconnected parts working together to maintain social order and equilibrium. From this starting point, functionalist sociologists developed the first systematically sociological explanations of why crime and deviance exist in every known society. Where earlier biological and psychological accounts located the causes of crime inside the individual offender, functionalists insisted that crime is a social fact to be explained by reference to the structure and condition of society itself. Counter-intuitively, and against common-sense assumptions, functionalists argue that a measured quantity of crime is not only inevitable but performs positive functions for the social system as a whole. This lesson examines the foundational contribution of Durkheim and the strain theory developed by Merton, before considering the strengths and limitations of the functionalist tradition and how it has been challenged by interactionist, Marxist and realist criminologies.
Key Definition: Crime is behaviour that breaks the formal laws of a society and is punishable by the state. Deviance is behaviour that violates the norms and values of a society but may not necessarily be illegal. The two categories overlap but are not identical: some crimes (such as minor speeding) attract little moral censure, while some deviant acts (such as serious breaches of etiquette) are not criminal at all.
This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) Paper 3: Crime and Deviance specification, specifically the requirement that students understand "crime, deviance, social order and social control" through functionalist, strain and subcultural theories of crime and deviance. It provides the consensus-theory foundation against which conflict and interactionist approaches are subsequently evaluated. The functionalist analysis of social order and the collective conscience also speaks directly to the broader Paper 3 theme of the relationship between deviance and the maintenance of social cohesion, while Merton's strain theory connects to the specification's concern with the social distribution of crime by class.
Emile Durkheim (1893, 1895, 1897) was the first sociologist to argue, in The Division of Labour in Society and The Rules of Sociological Method, that crime is not only inevitable but also functional for society. His analysis rests on the concept of the collective conscience and proceeds through two central claims.
Durkheim argued that crime exists in every known society — there is no society without crime, and the crime rate rises rather than falls as societies modernise. Even in a hypothetical "society of saints," peopled entirely by exemplary individuals, the most minor infractions of taste and decorum would be magnified into serious offences and treated as crimes. Crime is therefore not an aberration to be eliminated but a normal feature of all collective life. Durkheim offered two reasons. First, not every member of society is equally effectively socialised into the shared norms and values; some imperfect socialisation is unavoidable. Second, the increasing diversity of modern, industrial societies — with their complex division of labour — means that different groups develop distinct subcultures and values, so that what one group regards as normal another defines as deviant. The very differentiation that makes modern society dynamic also guarantees a degree of normative conflict.
Key Definition: The collective conscience is the shared set of norms, values, beliefs, and moral attitudes that operate as a unifying force within society, binding individuals into a moral community.
Crucially, Durkheim argued that crime is not merely inevitable but, in moderate quantities, positively beneficial. He identified several functions, which later functionalists extended:
| Function | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Boundary maintenance | The punishment of offenders dramatises and reaffirms the shared norms and values of the collective conscience. Court cases, media reporting and public outrage remind the wider community where the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lie. Kai Erikson (1966), in Wayward Puritans, developed this idea through a study of 17th-century Puritan New England, arguing that agencies of social control may even publicise deviance — through public trials and shaming — precisely in order to reaffirm collective values. Erikson suggested that society may sustain a relatively constant level of deviance because it serves this boundary-marking function. |
| Social cohesion / solidarity | Collective outrage at a serious crime draws the community together in a shared expression of moral indignation. The public response to atrocities can produce a powerful, if temporary, sense of solidarity and reaffirmation of shared humanity. |
| Social change | All change begins as deviance. Before new ideas and values can take hold, the existing collective conscience must be challenged, and those who challenge it are initially defined as deviant or criminal. Durkheim argued that today's deviant may be tomorrow's pioneer: the historical struggle for women's suffrage, for example, involved illegal protest that was later vindicated. A society that suppressed all deviance would be a society incapable of progress. |
| Safety valve | Kingsley Davis (1937, 1961) extended Durkheim's ideas, arguing that certain forms of minor deviance act as a safety valve that releases tension without threatening core institutions. Davis analysed prostitution as a release of male sexual frustration that, he argued, protected the institution of the nuclear family — a claim that is itself highly contestable (see Misconceptions). |
| Warning / adaptive function | Albert Cohen (1966) argued that deviance can act as a warning device, signalling that an institution is malfunctioning. A rising crime rate concentrated in a particular area or institution may alert society to the need for reform — for instance, high truancy rates indicating problems in a school. |
Durkheim's position should not be misread as approval of crime. He insisted there is an optimal level of crime for any society. Too little crime indicates a society so rigidly controlling that it stifles the individuality and innovation on which healthy social change depends. Too much crime tears the social fabric apart and threatens collective order. Crime becomes dysfunctional only when it exceeds this optimal level — a condition Durkheim associated with anomie (normlessness), a state arising especially during periods of rapid social change in which the collective conscience is weakened and the regulation of individual desires breaks down. In Suicide (1897), Durkheim showed that anomic conditions — sudden economic boom as much as sudden slump — disrupt the moral framework that normally restrains individual aspiration, producing higher rates of self-destruction and, by extension, of deviance generally.
Key Definition: Anomie is a state of normlessness in which the shared norms and values that regulate behaviour and limit individual desires break down, leaving individuals without clear moral guidance. For Durkheim, anomie is primarily a condition of society; for Merton, as we shall see, it becomes a description of the structural strain between goals and means.
Durkheim's account of crime cannot be separated from his broader theory of social order, set out in The Division of Labour in Society (1893). He distinguished two forms of social solidarity. In small, pre-industrial societies, solidarity was mechanical: people performed similar tasks, shared a strong and uniform collective conscience, and were bound together by likeness. Deviation from shared values was rare and harshly, often physically, punished, since an offence against shared norms was felt as an attack on the whole community. In large, complex industrial societies, by contrast, solidarity becomes organic: an elaborate division of labour makes individuals interdependent precisely because they differ and specialise. The collective conscience weakens and becomes more abstract, and law shifts from the repressive (punitive) form characteristic of mechanical solidarity toward the restitutive (compensatory, restorative) form that regulates the complex exchanges of organic solidarity. This historical movement explains why Durkheim expected crime to increase rather than vanish with modernity: greater differentiation produces greater normative diversity and a thinner shared morality.
Durkheim further argued that the transition to organic solidarity is prone to pathological forms. Where the division of labour is forced — that is, where individuals are allocated to positions by inherited wealth and power rather than by talent, so that the distribution of roles is widely felt to be unjust — solidarity fails to develop properly and anomie results. Crime, on this analysis, is partly a symptom of a society that has not yet evolved the moral regulation appropriate to its level of complexity. This is an important and often-missed point: Durkheim did not regard all levels of crime as healthy, and his concept of the forced division of labour gestures, albeit faintly, toward the inequalities that later conflict theorists would place at the centre of their analysis.
Robert K. Merton (1938), in his essay "Social Structure and Anomie", adapted Durkheim's concept to explain the patterning of crime in modern American society. Merton's decisive move was to relocate anomie from a general societal condition to a specific strain built into the relationship between two elements of the social structure:
Merton argued that American society is fundamentally unbalanced: it places overwhelming cultural emphasis on the goals while neglecting the legitimacy of the means, generating intense pressure to succeed "by any means necessary". At the same time, the opportunity structure is unequally distributed by class. Those at the bottom face blocked opportunities — under-resourced schooling, disadvantaged neighbourhoods and labour-market discrimination — yet are exposed to the same cultural pressure to achieve. The resulting gap between aspiration and realistic possibility is the strain to anomie. Merton stressed that crime is therefore produced by the normal functioning of the social and cultural structure, not by abnormal individuals.
Individuals adapt to strain in one of five ways, depending on whether they accept or reject the cultural goals and the institutionalised means:
| Mode | Cultural Goals | Institutionalised Means | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conformity | Accept | Accept | The majority response. People continue to pursue success through legitimate means even where the prospect of attaining it is slim. Conformity sustains social order. |
| Innovation | Accept | Reject | Individuals retain the goal of material success but adopt illegitimate means — theft, fraud, drug dealing — to reach it. This is the classic deviant adaptation and explains the prevalence of utilitarian property crime among those facing blocked opportunity. |
| Ritualism | Reject (abandon) | Accept | Individuals lose sight of the success goal but cling rigidly to the rules and routines — the over-conforming, low-aspiration bureaucrat. Technically deviant in spirit, though not criminal. |
| Retreatism | Reject | Reject | Individuals reject both goals and means and withdraw from society altogether. Merton associated this "double failure" with chronic drug addiction, alcoholism and vagrancy. |
| Rebellion | Replace | Replace | Individuals reject existing goals and means and seek to substitute new ones, working to transform the social order. Revolutionary and counter-cultural movements exemplify this adaptation. |
The relationship between strain, the opportunity structure and these adaptations can be summarised as follows:
graph TD
A["Strong cultural emphasis on success goals"] --> C["Strain to anomie"]
B["Unequal access to legitimate means (blocked opportunity)"] --> C
C --> D["Conformity: accept goals + means"]
C --> E["Innovation: accept goals, reject means (crime)"]
C --> F["Ritualism: abandon goals, keep means"]
C --> G["Retreatism: reject both (drop out)"]
C --> H["Rebellion: replace both (new order)"]
Strain theory accounts for the apparent concentration of recorded crime among lower-class groups: they experience the sharpest disjunction between culturally induced aspiration and structurally limited opportunity. It also explains why so much recorded crime is utilitarian property crime — innovation directed at acquiring the material success that legitimate channels have denied. The theory can be applied to contemporary consumer culture, in which intensified advertising and social-media display heighten material aspiration across all groups while opportunity remains unequally distributed. A young person who has internalised the cultural promise of affluence, but who faces a poorly resourced school, an insecure local labour market and the daily visibility of wealth they cannot legitimately attain, occupies exactly the structural position Merton describes; innovation through, say, drug dealing becomes an intelligible (if destructive) adaptation to strain rather than an inexplicable individual failing.
Merton's framework has been substantially updated for contemporary market societies by Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (1994) in their institutional anomie theory, set out in Crime and the American Dream. They argue that the American Dream is not merely a set of goals but a cultural ethos that subordinates all social institutions — the family, the education system, the political order — to the imperatives of the economy. The relentless cultural emphasis on monetary success, competition and individual achievement weakens the capacity of non-economic institutions to restrain anti-social behaviour and to instil non-material values. On this account, high crime rates are not an aberration but a predictable expression of a society in which market values have colonised every sphere of life. Institutional anomie theory thus retains Merton's core insight — that crime flows from the normal operation of the cultural and social structure — while answering one of his sharpest critics: it can explain why crime occurs not only among the materially deprived but also among the affluent, for whom the cultural pressure to accumulate is, if anything, more intense. It also connects strain theory to debates about consumerism, marketisation and the erosion of community that recur across the sociology of crime.
Strengths
Limitations
Strengths
Limitations
Durkheim and Merton share the foundational functionalist commitment that crime is to be explained by the structure and condition of society rather than by individual pathology, and both treat a degree of crime as the normal product of a normally functioning social order. Their emphases differ: Durkheim is principally interested in the functions of crime for the maintenance of the social system, whereas Merton is interested in the structural causes of differential offending within a society that promotes uniform goals across an unequal opportunity structure. Read together, they offer a powerful macro account linking crime, inequality and the weakening of moral regulation. But the very features that make functionalism distinctive also expose it to attack from the perspectives studied later in this topic. The following table situates the functionalist account against its principal rivals and is a useful revision aid for the synoptic evaluation that 30-mark questions reward:
| Perspective | What causes crime? | What is the role of the law? | Key weakness identified by critics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Functionalism (Durkheim, Merton) | Inevitable imperfect socialisation and diversity (Durkheim); structural strain between goals and means (Merton) | Expresses and reinforces a genuine value consensus | Assumes consensus; neglects power, the victim and the crimes of the powerful |
| Subcultural (A. Cohen; Cloward and Ohlin) | Collective responses (status frustration; differential illegitimate opportunity) to blocked goals | Largely taken as given | Internally inconsistent; gender-blind; assumes working-class criminality |
| Interactionism / labelling (Becker, Lemert) | Crime is constructed by social reaction; secondary deviance follows labelling | A resource the powerful use to define others as deviant | Neglects the origins of primary deviance; lacks a theory of structural power |
| Marxism (Gordon, Chambliss) | Criminogenic capitalism; inequality, alienation and elite greed | Serves ruling-class interests; enforced selectively | Determinism; neglect of gender and intra-class crime |
| Left realism (Lea and Young) | Relative deprivation, marginalisation and subculture | Should be made democratic and accountable | Limited to street crime; relative deprivation hard to measure |
This synoptic mapping helps explain why functionalist and strain theories, though foundational, are now generally treated as a starting point requiring supplementation: they theorise social order and the structural roots of crime with unusual clarity, but they say little about how crime is socially constructed (the interactionist contribution) or about whose interests the law and its enforcement serve (the conflict contribution).
Item A Functionalist sociologists argue that a moderate level of crime can perform positive functions for society as a whole. They point to the way that responses to crime can remind people of shared values and can even, in some cases, contribute to social change over time.
Applying material from Item A, analyse two functions that crime may perform for society. [10 marks]
Item B Functionalist theories explain crime by reference to the structure of society. Durkheim argued that crime is inevitable and can be functional, while Merton argued that crime results from a strain between the goals society encourages people to pursue and the legitimate opportunities available to them.
However, other sociologists argue that functionalist and strain theories fail to explain who commits crime and why, and that they ignore the role of power in defining what counts as crime in the first place.
Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate functionalist and strain theories of crime and deviance. [30 marks]
AO breakdown (30-mark essay): the mark scheme rewards roughly equal weighting of AO1 knowledge and understanding (accurate, detailed exposition of Durkheim and Merton, with concepts such as collective conscience, boundary maintenance, anomie, strain and the modes of adaptation), AO2 application (sustained, explicit use of both hooks in the Item — the structural explanation of crime and the criticism that these theories ignore power), and AO3 analysis and evaluation (developed critique from subcultural, interactionist, Marxist and realist perspectives, leading to a substantiated conclusion).
Mid-band response (extract): "Durkheim said that crime is functional because it does good things for society. One function is boundary maintenance — when someone is punished it shows everyone what the rules are. Another is social change, because deviants can change society like the suffragettes did. Merton had a theory called strain theory where people can't reach their goals so they turn to crime through innovation. Some people think these theories are wrong because they don't look at the victims of crime." This response shows accurate but undeveloped knowledge, lists functions without fully explaining the mechanism, and offers only assertion-level evaluation with limited use of the Item.
Stronger response (extract): "Durkheim argues that the public punishment of offenders performs a boundary-maintenance function: the trial operates as a 'degradation ceremony' that dramatises the collective conscience and reaffirms shared values, a claim Erikson supports through his study of the Puritans. Merton relocates Durkheim's anomie to the strain between culturally promoted success goals and the unequally distributed legitimate means of achieving them, so that those facing blocked opportunity are pushed toward innovation. This is persuasive in explaining utilitarian property crime, but it struggles with non-utilitarian crime such as vandalism, which yields no material reward — a weakness that subcultural theorists such as Cohen address." This response explains mechanisms accurately, uses named studies, applies the Item, and integrates evaluation, but the critique could be more synoptic and the conclusion is undeveloped.
Top-band response (extract): "The force of the functionalist account lies in its refusal of common-sense pathology: by treating crime as a social fact, Durkheim makes its very normality the object of explanation, and the boundary-maintenance and adaptive functions (extended by Erikson and A. Cohen) capture the way societies use deviance to police their own moral limits. Yet the explanatory cost is high. The 'optimal level' is unfalsifiable, and as Item B suggests, the functionalist consensus is silent on power: Marxists argue that the collective conscience encodes ruling-class interests, so that boundary maintenance dramatises some harms (working-class theft) while corporate violence escapes the same ceremony. Merton's strain theory partially answers the 'who and why' question by grounding crime in structural inequality, and its predictive grip on lower-class property crime is real; but its individualism cannot explain group delinquency, and its exclusive focus on blocked opportunity cannot accommodate the white-collar offender who already possesses the means. The most defensible conclusion is that functionalist and strain theories remain indispensable for theorising the relationship between crime and social order, but require supplementation by interactionist accounts of how crime is socially constructed and by conflict accounts of whose interests the law and its enforcement serve." This response sustains conceptual analysis, deploys the Item as an analytical hinge, ranges synoptically across perspectives, and reaches an evaluative, substantiated judgement.
An examiner-style reading of these extracts would note that the difference between bands is not the quantity of knowledge but its deployment. The mid-band answer "knows" the functions but treats them as a list; the stronger answer explains how each mechanism works and begins to evaluate; the top-band answer turns the Item's reference to power into the organising thread of a genuinely analytical argument and reaches a defensible conclusion. Examiners reward explicit, repeated engagement with both hooks in the Item, the integration of evaluation throughout rather than a bolted-on final paragraph, and the use of named, accurate studies. A common ceiling on otherwise able answers is the failure to convert listed criticisms into a reasoned overall judgement.
This content is aligned with the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) specification.