In Merton's 1938 typology, which mode of adaptation accepts the culturally prescribed goals while eliminating the institutionalized means of reaching them?
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Criminal Justice & Criminology · Criminology
Strain Theory
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Strain theories explain crime as a response to pressure. Robert Merton's 1938 article put that pressure in the social structure: a culture that urges everyone toward the same success goal while handing out legitimate means unevenly. Robert Agnew's 1992 general strain theory moved it inside the person, where disliked events produce negative emotions, especially anger, and crime is one way of coping. The two versions answer different questions and have fared very differently in testing. This lesson is educational material, not legal or policy advice.
Why this matters
Strain theory is the argument you are actually hearing whenever someone says that blocked opportunity, unfairness, or pressure produces crime. Learning it properly means learning to separate three things that get run together: what Merton claimed, what Agnew claimed, and what the studies found. Courses in criminology, sociology, and public policy will ask you to name a theory's level of analysis, state its mechanism, and say what evidence would count against it. Strain theory is an unusually good place to practice, because the same label covers a macro-sociological claim about a whole society and a social-psychological claim about one adolescent's week, and the evidence for the two is not the same.
The college version
Durkheim's anomie, and what Merton did to it
Emile Durkheim used the word Anomie A breakdown in the normative regulation of desire and conduct. Durkheim used it for a state of deregulation in which traditional rules lose their authority; Merton used it for a mismatch between a culture's goals and its distribution of legitimate means. Full entry → for a state of deregulation in which established rules lose their authority. In Suicide (1897) he connected it to what he called the mal d'infini: a society normally defines what its members may legitimately want in wealth, goods, and pleasure, and when that definition fails, desires run past anything that could satisfy them and expectations stop matching reality. His subject was the moral condition of a whole society, not the decisions of particular people. Merton kept the word and kept the level of analysis, but changed the mechanism. For Durkheim, anomie is desire left unregulated. For Merton, it is a mismatch between what a culture teaches people to want and what its structure lets them reach. That substitution is the whole move, and it is worth holding onto, because the two ideas get used interchangeably and they are not the same idea.
Merton 1938: goals, means, and the disjunction
"Social Structure and Anomie" appeared in the American Sociological Review in October 1938, volume 3, number 5, pages 672 to 682. Merton opened by rejecting the then-common view that deviance is biological impulse breaking through social restraint; that view, he argued, gives no account of the nonbiological conditions that produce departures from prescribed conduct. His own aim was to show how some social structures exert a definite pressure on certain people to behave nonconformingly. He separated two elements of social and cultural structure. The first is the set of culturally defined goals, purposes, and interests, which together form a frame of aspirational reference. The second is the body of institutional norms that regulate the acceptable ways of reaching those goals. When a culture places extreme emphasis on a goal such as accumulated wealth as a symbol of success, and the emotional supports for the rules of the game weaken accordingly, the pressure runs toward whatever means are technically efficient rather than whatever means are approved. Merton's illustration was competitive sport, where an exclusive focus on winning makes illegitimate but effective tactics attractive; he treated it as a small image of the wider society, and noted that the surreptitious way people break the rules shows they still know what the rules are. He was explicit that the resulting pressure is not spread evenly. Where opportunity is confined to unskilled labor and manual work is culturally stigmatized, he argued, the structural result is a strain toward innovational practices.
The five modes of adaptation, read carefully
On page 676 Merton laid out five logically possible modes of adjustment or adaptation in a short table with two columns, culture goals and Institutionalized means The normatively approved methods a society permits for reaching its valued ends, together with the moral force attached to using them. Full entry →. A plus sign means acceptance, a minus sign means elimination, and a plus-or-minus means rejection combined with substitution of new goals and standards. Conformity accepts both. Innovation accepts the goals and eliminates the means. Ritualism eliminates the goals and keeps the means. Retreatism eliminates both. Rebellion rejects both and substitutes new ones, which Merton set apart on its own line as a transitional response aimed at changing the structure rather than accommodating within it. Two things are routinely lost in retelling. First, Merton wrote in the very next paragraph that people shift from one alternative to another as they move between different social activities, and that these categories describe role adjustments in specific situations, not personality as a whole. Textbooks that label the table a set of personality types are asserting something he explicitly denied. Second, the five are not of equal interest to him. Conformity, he said, is the most common and most widely diffused adaptation in every society, and retreatism the least common; his stated major concern was the illegitimacy adjustment, which is innovation - keeping the success goal while dropping the approved means of reaching it.
Cohen, Cloward, and Ohlin: status and opportunity
Two mid-century books extended Merton and are usually taught with him. Albert K. Cohen's Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (1955) argued that the strain need not be economic at all. Lower-class boys are measured against middle-class standards they are poorly placed to meet, and the resulting Status frustration Albert Cohen's term for the pressure felt by young people who are measured against standards they are poorly placed to meet and who then seek worth in a group that keeps score differently. Full entry → pushes them toward a group that inverts those standards and awards status on its own terms - which was the puzzle he set out to explain: why so much juvenile offending happens in company rather than alone. Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (1960), building on Cloward's 1959 American Sociological Review article, added the observation Merton had skipped: illegitimate opportunities are unequally distributed too. Blocked legitimate opportunity does not automatically produce a thief, because becoming a successful thief also requires access, contacts, and tutelage. On that premise they distinguished criminal subcultures, which offer organized illicit earning; conflict subcultures, where organized illicit earning is not available either and frustration is vented through violence; and retreatist subcultures, formed by those who fail at both the legitimate and the illegitimate route. Agnew still identified Merton, Cohen, and Cloward and Ohlin as the three models most empirical strain research relied on when he wrote in 1992.
Agnew 1992: general strain theory
By the early 1990s the tradition was in retreat. Agnew's own opening in "Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency" (Criminology, volume 30, number 1, February 1992, pages 47 to 87) records that after dominating deviance research in the 1960s, strain theory came under heavy attack in the 1970s, with prominent researchers - he names Hirschi in 1969 and Kornhauser in 1978 - proposing that it be abandoned, and that although it survived, its influence was much diminished. His response was to rebuild it on material from outside criminology: stress research in medical sociology and psychology, equity and justice research in social psychology, and aggression research including recent versions of frustration-aggression. The rebuilt theory widens strain from one blocked goal to three families, each of which may be actual or anticipated: the failure to achieve positively valued goals; the removal of positively valued stimuli, such as losing a relationship or a possession; and the presentation of negatively valued or noxious stimuli, such as abuse, bullying, or victimization. Agnew also separated objective strains, disliked by most people in a group, from subjective strains, disliked by the particular person experiencing them - a distinction that matters because two people can meet the same objective circumstance and react to it differently. The mechanism is emotional. Strains generate negative emotions, anger and frustration foremost, and those emotions create pressure for corrective action. Crime is one available correction: it can produce money, discharge anger, or dull the feeling.
What decides whether strain becomes crime
Because almost everyone experiences strain and most people do not respond to it with crime, the theory lives or dies on what conditions the response. Agnew answered at two levels. In 2001 he specified which strains are criminogenic: those seen as unjust, those high in magnitude, those associated with low social control, and those that create some pressure or incentive toward Criminal coping Responding to a disliked event by breaking the law, rather than through the legal alternatives available to the same person. Full entry → in particular. A large, lasting, unfair loss that crime could plausibly repair is far more dangerous than a small, fair, irreparable one. At the level of the person, criminal coping is more likely among those with poor coping skills and resources, few conventional social supports, low social control or little to lose, and a disposition toward criminal coping - criminal associates, beliefs favorable to crime, and traits such as low constraint and negative emotionality - and in situations where the costs of offending look low and the benefits high. This is where general strain theory differs most visibly from Merton, whose account of why one person innovates and another ritualizes was comparatively thin.
Institutional anomie theory: the macro level returns
Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld took the tradition back up to Merton's original altitude in Crime and the American Dream (1994). Their Institutional anomie theory Messner and Rosenfeld's macro-level account, in which a strong cultural push toward monetary success plus weak restraint from a society's non-economic institutions yields high rates of instrumental crime. Full entry → holds that culturally and structurally produced pressures to secure monetary rewards, combined with weak controls from non-economic social institutions, promote high levels of instrumental crime. The claim is not simply that a society wants money; it is that when the economy dominates the other institutions, those institutions lose the capacity to restrain the pursuit. Chamlin and Cochran tested part of this on United States state data in 1995 and reported considerable but indirect support: the effect of poverty on property crime depended on structural indicators of how far non-economic institutions could offset economic deprivation. Messner and Rosenfeld themselves applied the theory across nations to levels of criminal homicide in 1997.
What the evidence actually shows
The record is uneven and worth stating precisely. For classic Mertonian strain it is poor. Burton and Cullen's 1992 review found tests yielding mixed results, with the level of support varying by how strain was operationalized and with methodological limits complicating any assessment. Part of the trouble was the measure itself: strain was usually captured indirectly as the gap between a person's aspirations and their expectations. Agnew, Cullen, Burton, Evans, and Dunaway argued in 1996 that the variable the theory actually names - dissatisfaction with one's own monetary status - had been ignored in virtually all tests, and when they measured it directly in a sample of Cincinnati adults it predicted income-generating crime and drug use, most strongly among those with criminal friends and crime-favorable beliefs, which they called qualified support unlike much previous research. Relatedly, most studies find individual economic status unrelated or only weakly related to individual offending, a result Agnew reads as a modest relationship over much of the income range that becomes substantial only for the very poor. General strain theory has done better. Agnew and White's 1992 test on 1,380 New Jersey adolescents found the three types of strain had a relatively substantial effect on delinquency and drug use, conditioned by delinquent peers and self-efficacy just as predicted, which the authors themselves described as qualified support. But the honest summary stops short of vindication. Agnew conceded in 2001 that researchers have little guidance for choosing among hundreds of candidate strains and cannot explain why only some are related to crime, so what different studies call strain differs widely and the estimates are not straightforwardly comparable. Froggio's 2007 review of the 1992 to 2003 literature still treated the theory's empirical status as an open question. Effects are generally modest; neither version is an established explanation of crime in general.
Structural theory, social-psychological theory, and why the difference matters
Merton's unit of analysis is a society. He is explaining why rates of deviance differ across groups and strata from the way a culture's goals sit against its distribution of legitimate means, and individuals appear as occupants of structural positions rather than as people with histories. He said as much in closing: the paper had not tested the scheme's explanatory power against a large number of group variations in the frequency of deviant and conformist behavior. Agnew's unit is a person. Strains are events and conditions an individual dislikes, the mechanism is that individual's emotion, and the conditioning variables are coping skills, social support, self-efficacy, temperament, and peers - which is why a reviewer can accurately call general strain theory a social-psychological interpretation of delinquency. Institutional anomie theory pulls back to the macro level again. The three are best read as answers to different questions rather than as rivals, which is also why evidence that undercuts one may leave the others standing. Strain theory has been invoked in support of very different policy programs; this lesson describes a body of scholarship and its evidence, is educational material rather than legal advice, and takes no position among those programs.
Eli explains
The same idea, in plain words
Explain it like I’m 10
Imagine a school where everyone is told that the only thing that counts is winning the science fair, and the trophy is talked about constantly. But only some students have a parent who can help, a quiet place to work, and money for materials. Merton's point is that you can predict trouble just from that setup, without knowing a single student personally. Some students will still play fair. Some will keep wanting the trophy and start cutting corners. Some will give up on the trophy but keep following every rule anyway. Some will stop caring about either. And some will try to change what the school rewards. Agnew's point is different. He says the important thing is not only the trophy but everything in a student's week that feels bad and unfair - being shoved in the hallway, losing a friend, being yelled at when you get home. Those things make people angry, anger makes people want to do something, and whether that something breaks a rule depends on who is around them and what else they know how to do.
Picture it like this
Merton's version is like studying a game of musical chairs: you do not need to know the players to predict that people will start pushing, because the chairs were removed on purpose while the music kept telling everyone to sit down.
Where the picture stops working
The analogy stops working in three places. Musical chairs has one goal and one clear moment of failure; real strain includes losses and mistreatment that have nothing to do with any goal, which is exactly what Agnew added. In musical chairs everyone who loses knows it instantly, whereas Merton's pressure works slowly and mostly on people who never name it. And the game guarantees losers by design, while the evidence on real societies is far messier - blocked opportunity raises the odds of some kinds of offending modestly, and most people who are pushed out of the game do not push back.
Worked example
Take a seventeen-year-old who has been cut from the team he built his identity around, is being threatened daily by an older student, and has no adult he trusts enough to tell. He begins fighting at school. A Mertonian reading has little to work with here: no monetary success goal is blocked and no illegitimate earning is involved, so the case sits outside what the 1938 scheme was built to explain. Agnew's reading fits it directly. Two of the three strain types are present - the removal of something valued and the presentation of something noxious - and both are large, ongoing, and readily seen as unjust, which is the profile Agnew's 2001 criteria flag as criminogenic. The emotional pathway is anger; the conditioning factors are the absence of conventional social support and of practiced legal coping. Notice what the theory does not do: it makes his fighting more probable, not predicted, and if he had one trusted adult the same strains might produce nothing at all.
Key takeaway
Strain theory is two theories under one name: Merton's structural claim that a culture can push people toward crime by demanding a goal it does not equip everyone to reach, and Agnew's social-psychological claim that disliked events produce anger and that anger sometimes produces crime, depending on what else a person has to draw on. The second has held up better in testing than the first, and neither explains crime in general.
Quick check
3 questions here, of 5 in this lesson’s practice set. Answers stay hidden until you check.
Which of the following is NOT one of the three sources of strain Agnew set out in his 1992 general strain theory?
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A seventeen-year-old loses a place on a team central to how she sees herself, is threatened daily by another student, and has no adult she trusts enough to tell. She starts fighting at school. Which reading of this case best matches general strain theory as Agnew stated it?
Choose an answer, then check it.
Study tools & related lessonsYou’ll learn to · Common mistakes · Easily confused · Key vocabulary · Related
You’ll learn to
- Define anomie in Durkheim's sense and explain how Merton changed the concept when he borrowed it.
- Explain Merton's disjunction between cultural goals and institutionalized means, and reproduce his five modes of adaptation with the conditions he attached to them.
- Distinguish Cohen's status frustration from Cloward and Ohlin's differential opportunity.
- Describe Agnew's three sources of strain, the emotional mechanism, and the factors that condition whether strain produces crime.
- Analyze why Mertonian strain is a structural theory while general strain theory is largely social-psychological.
- Evaluate the empirical record for both versions, including how the measurement of strain affects the result.
Common mistakes
Treating Merton's five adaptations as personality types, so that a person simply is an innovator or a ritualist.
Merton wrote immediately after presenting the table that people shift between these alternatives across different social activities and that the categories describe role adjustments in specific situations, not personality as a whole. The same person may conform at work and innovate elsewhere.
Summarizing strain theory as "poverty causes crime."
Merton's claim is about the gap between what a culture demands and what its structure supplies, not about income by itself. Empirically, most studies find individual economic status unrelated or only weakly related to individual offending; Agnew reads the relationship as modest across most of the range and substantial only for the very poor.
Reading "innovation" as a compliment, or confusing it with rebellion.
In Merton's table innovation means keeping the culturally prescribed goal while eliminating the approved means - it is his label for the illegitimacy adjustment and his main criminological interest. Rebellion is different: it rejects both the goal and the means and substitutes new ones, aiming to change the structure rather than to succeed within it.
Treating Agnew's general strain theory as a restatement of Merton with more examples.
The level of analysis changes. Merton explains rates of deviance across a society's strata from the arrangement of goals and means; Agnew explains an individual's offending through disliked events, the negative emotions they produce, and that person's coping resources and associates.
Citing strain theory as a confirmed explanation of crime.
Tests of classic strain have been mixed, with support depending heavily on how strain was measured. General strain theory has done better and its predicted conditioning effects have been found, but effects are generally modest, what counts as "strain" differs widely across studies, and reviewers were still calling its empirical status an open question in 2007.
Easily confused
Merton's classic strain theory (1938) vs. Agnew's general strain theory (1992)
Merton explains differing rates of deviance across a society's groups from one structural mismatch between cultural goals and legitimate means. Agnew explains one person's offending from any disliked event or condition, through negative emotion, moderated by that person's coping resources, supports, and associates.
Innovation vs. Rebellion
Both depart from the approved means, but innovation keeps the society's success goal and simply reaches it another way, while rebellion discards the goal as well and substitutes a new set of goals and standards, seeking to change the structure rather than to win inside it.
Cohen's status frustration (1955) vs. Cloward and Ohlin's differential opportunity (1960)
Cohen explains why strained youths form an alternative status system - the strain is about standing, not money. Cloward and Ohlin explain why strained youths in different neighborhoods end up in different kinds of groups, because illegitimate opportunities are themselves unequally available.
Strain theories vs. Social control theories
Strain theories ask what motivates a normally law-abiding person into crime and answer with pressure. Control theories assume the motivation is already general and ask instead what usually restrains people. Agnew wrote general strain theory partly to restore strain's standing after critiques such as Hirschi's in 1969 and Kornhauser's in 1978 had pushed it to the margins.
Key vocabulary
- Anomie
- A breakdown in the normative regulation of desire and conduct. Durkheim used it for a state of deregulation in which traditional rules lose their authority; Merton used it for a mismatch between a culture's goals and its distribution of legitimate means.
- Cultural goals
- The ends a society teaches its members to pursue and treats as worth having, forming what Merton called a frame of aspirational reference.
- Institutionalized means
- The normatively approved methods a society permits for reaching its valued ends, together with the moral force attached to using them.
- Modes of adaptation
- Merton's five-way scheme for how a person may combine acceptance or elimination of a society's ends with acceptance or elimination of its approved methods: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.
- Status frustration
- Albert Cohen's term for the pressure felt by young people who are measured against standards they are poorly placed to meet and who then seek worth in a group that keeps score differently.
- Differential opportunity
- Cloward and Ohlin's argument that illegitimate routes to success are unequally distributed as well, so blocked legitimate access does not by itself determine what form, if any, offending will take.
- Strain (in Agnew's sense)
- An event or condition that a person dislikes, whether because most people in that group would dislike it or because this particular person does.
- Criminal coping
- Responding to a disliked event by breaking the law, rather than through the legal alternatives available to the same person.
- Institutional anomie theory
- Messner and Rosenfeld's macro-level account, in which a strong cultural push toward monetary success plus weak restraint from a society's non-economic institutions yields high rates of instrumental crime.
Sources & references
- Social Structure and Anomie, American Sociological Review 3(5):672-682 (October 1938) — Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Association
- Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Paul Carls, University of Montreal, for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ISSN 2161-0002)
- 5.9. Strain Theories, in SOU-CCJ230 Introduction to the American Criminal Justice System — Brian Fedorek, in Burke, Carter, Fedorek, Morey, Rutz-Burri & Sanchez (Open Oregon Educational Resources / Pressbooks)
- Illegitimate Means, Anomie, and Deviant Behavior, American Sociological Review 24(2):164-176 (April 1959) — Richard A. Cloward, American Sociological Association
- Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency, Criminology 30(1):47-87 (February 1992) — Robert Agnew, American Society of Criminology / Wiley
- An Empirical Test of General Strain Theory, Criminology 30(4):475-500 (November 1992) — Robert Agnew and Helene Raskin White, American Society of Criminology / Wiley
- Building on the Foundation of General Strain Theory: Specifying the Types of Strain Most Likely to Lead to Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 38(4):319-361 (November 2001) — Robert Agnew, SAGE Publications
- Strain, Economic Status, and Crime, chapter 11 in Alex R. Piquero (ed.), The Handbook of Criminological Theory (Wiley, 2015) — Robert Agnew, in John Wiley & Sons
- The Empirical Status of Strain Theory, Journal of Crime and Justice 15(2):1-30 (1992) — Velmer S. Burton Jr. and Francis T. Cullen, Taylor & Francis
- A New Test of Classic Strain Theory, Justice Quarterly 13(4):681-704 (December 1996) — Robert Agnew, Francis T. Cullen, Velmer S. Burton Jr., T. David Evans and R. Gregory Dunaway, Taylor & Francis
- Assessing Messner and Rosenfeld's Institutional Anomie Theory: A Partial Test, Criminology 33(3):411-429 (August 1995) — Mitchell B. Chamlin and John K. Cochran, American Society of Criminology / Wiley
- Political Restraint of the Market and Levels of Criminal Homicide: A Cross-National Application of Institutional-Anomie Theory, Social Forces 75(4):1393-1416 (June 1997) — Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld, Oxford University Press
- Strain and Juvenile Delinquency: A Critical Review of Agnew's General Strain Theory (NCJ 231684), abstract of Journal of Loss and Trauma 12(4):383-418 (July 2007) — National Criminal Justice Reference Service Virtual Library, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice
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Researched 2026-08-19
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