Question

Explain Mertons concept of anomie is and what the modes of adaptation to it are?

Answer 1

The basic idea of Robert K. Merton’s anomie theory is that most people strive to achieve culturally recognized goals. A state of anomie develops when access to these goals is blocked to entire groups of people or individuals. The result is a deviant behaviour characterized by rebellion, retreat, ritualism, innovation, and/or conformity. Crime results predominantly from innovation.

Merton’s anomie theory was published in 1938, but due to the unawakened social interest it represented a so-called “sleep theory”. Only the renewed publication in the year 1954 provided for public interest. Merton refines Durkheim’s remarks by describing the missing social rules that lead to anomie and linking them to the aspect of the value-medium discrepancy. Anomic conditions are no longer seen in the gap between needs and satisfaction, but in the discrepancy between goals and means.

Crime arises from the divergence between the social objectives recognised as legitimate and the limited access to the means necessary to achieve these objectives. This discrepancy between goals and means varies from class to class, but is possible in all strata. The discrepancy results in a disorientation of the individual and causes psychological stress as well as social conflicts. The focus of his interest is not the deviation of individual individuals (micro level), but the search for the explanation of different deviation rates of different societies and groups (macro level).

◇ Merton’s typology of models of adaptation

In order to be able to cope with this pressure, individual recourse is made to one of the following 5 behavioural patterns

▪︎Conformity:
Acceptance of cultural goals and adaptation to social change
▪︎Innovation:
Acceptance of cultural goals, non-recognition of legal means to achieve the goals.
▪︎Ritualism:
Lowering / abandoning the cultural goals and maintaining legal means to achieve them.
▪︎Retreatism:
Rejection of cultural goals and legal means ▪︎ Rebellion:
Combating the objectives and the means to change social structures.
According to Merton, people from lower social strata tend to resort to such means because they have fewer opportunities than higher strata to achieve cultural goals.