Social control theories: labeling theory (Becker), strain theory (Merton), control theory

Overview Beginner

Why do people break rules? Sociologists offer several answers, and this unit presents the three most influential. Each asks a different question. Robert Merton asks why the structure of society pushes some people toward deviance. Howard Becker asks why some behaviors get branded "deviant" in the first place. Travis Hirschi flips the puzzle and asks why most people do not deviate most of the time.

The three are less rivals than lenses trained on different parts of one problem: the pressure to offend, the power to define an act as deviant, and the bonds that hold most people in line. Together they explain why deviance falls unevenly across class and race, why labels stick to some people and slide off others, and why most of us obey most rules most of the time.

Strain theory: Merton's five adaptations Beginner

Robert Merton's strain theory, published in 1938, says deviance happens when society pressures people to achieve culturally approved goals — wealth, success, status — but does not give everyone the legitimate means to reach them. The gap between the goals everyone is told to chase and the opportunities actually available produces strain. People adapt to that strain in different ways.

Merton mapped five adaptations. Conformity accepts both the goals and the means — most people, most of the time. Innovation keeps the goals but abandons legitimate means: the thief, the fraudster, the drug dealer who wants the same wealth others earn honestly. Ritualism abandons the goals but clings to the means — the over-conscientious bureaucrat who follows every rule and aspires to nothing.

Retreatism rejects both goals and means — the addict, the hermit, the dropout who walks away from the game entirely. Rebellion rejects both and tries to replace them with new ones — the revolutionary, the separatist, the militant who wants a different social order altogether. Strain theory predicts that deviance clusters where legitimate opportunity is thinnest, which helps explain why it tracks class and race.

Labeling and control: whose rules, whose bonds Beginner

Howard Becker's labeling theory, set out in Outsiders (1963), flips the question. Instead of asking why people deviate, Becker asks why some behaviors get labeled "deviant" and others do not. A behavior is deviant only when someone with the power to do so labels it. Moral entrepreneurs — anti-drug crusaders, temperance activists, reformers of every kind — campaign to have behaviors criminalized, and their success depends on political power, not on the harm the behavior causes.

Once a person is labeled, the consequences compound. The label can become a master status that swamps every other identity — student, parent, worker — and defines the person as a deviant first. Shut out of conventional opportunities, the person may be pushed into "secondary deviance": further offending that follows from the label itself rather than from the original act. The label, in short, helps produce the very behavior it claims to describe.

Travis Hirschi's control theory, published in 1969, asks the opposite question from Merton and Becker: why do not more people deviate? His answer is social bonds. Four bonds keep us in line: attachment to people who matter to us, commitment to conventional goals like school and career, involvement in conventional activities that crowd out temptation, and belief that the rules are basically legitimate. When the bonds are weak, deviance becomes more likely.

When the bonds are strong, deviance is held in check. Control theory thus explains what strain and labeling leave out: why the vast majority of people, even under pressure and even when they could get away with it, obey the rules most of the time.

Figure: The three social control theories as complementary lenses. Merton accounts for the pressure to offend, Becker for the power to define, and Hirschi for the bonds that resist deviance.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definitions Intermediate

Strain theory (Merton). Robert Merton's structural theory, set out in "Social Structure and Anomie" (1938), holds that a society defines culturally approved goals (in the United States, above all material success) and institutionalizes legitimate means for reaching them (schooling, employment, saving). Strain arises when access to the means is distributed unequally while aspiration to the goals is distributed universally. Merton derived five adaptations: conformity (accept goals and means), innovation (accept goals, reject means — theft, fraud, drug dealing), ritualism (abandon goals, cling to means — the rule-bound bureaucrat), retreatism (reject both — addiction, withdrawal), and rebellion (replace both with new goals and means — revolution). The theory predicts that deviance concentrates where legitimate opportunity is thinnest.

Labeling theory (Becker). Howard Becker's symbolic-interactionist account, developed in Outsiders (1963) and building on Edwin Lemert's distinction between primary and secondary deviance, holds that deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits but a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender." Social groups create deviance by making rules and applying them to particular people. Moral entrepreneurs campaign to have behaviors criminalized; their success depends on political power rather than on the harm the behavior causes. Primary deviance is the initial norm violation; secondary deviance is the ongoing deviant identity that develops when a person internalizes the label and reorganizes life around it. The label can become a master status that overrides every other identity. Erving Goffman extended the account to stigma — the spoiled identity that follows the labeled person into every interaction.

Control theory (Hirschi). Travis Hirschi's Causes of Delinquency (1969) reverses the usual question: instead of asking why people deviate, it asks why they do not. Hirschi's answer is social bonds, specified as four elements: attachment to significant others whose opinion matters; commitment to conventional lines of activity (school, work) that deviance would jeopardize; involvement in conventional activities that leave little time for deviance; and belief in the moral validity of the social rules one is tempted to break. When the bonds are weak, deviance becomes more likely. Michael Gottfredson and Hirschi later generalized the account in A General Theory of Crime (1990), arguing that low self-control, established in early childhood by ineffective parenting, predicts offending throughout life.

Differential association (Sutherland). Edwin Sutherland's theory, first stated in 1939 and later refined with Donald Cressey, holds that criminal behavior is learned through intimate personal groups. A person becomes delinquent when exposure to definitions favorable to law violation outweighs exposure to definitions favorable to law abiding. Ronald Akers, with Robert Burgess, updated the theory as social learning theory, adding operant conditioning: behavior is shaped by the rewards and punishments that follow it within the peer group. The mechanism is transmission, not strain, labeling, or weak bonds.

Conflict theory of crime. A family of theories holding that criminal law is an instrument of the ruling class and that crime is produced by inequality rather than by individual pathology. Richard Quinney argued that capitalism generates both the conditions that produce crime and the legal categories that criminalize the poor. William Chambliss distinguished "rough law" (applied to the poor) from "smooth law" (applied to the affluent), observing that working-class youth are criminalized for behavior the wealthy commit without consequence. Steven Spitzer framed deviant populations as "problem populations" that the state manages through criminalization when they threaten capitalist order.

Functionalism (Durkheim). Émile Durkheim argued that a certain level of crime and deviance is normal and even functional. Deviance affirms cultural values by drawing a line between right and wrong; the collective reaction to it clarifies moral boundaries and reinforces social solidarity. A crime rate that is too low signals oppressive conformity; a rate that is too high signals breakdown. Deviance can also seed social change, since today's deviance may become tomorrow's norm. Functionalism explains why deviance is universal but not why it is distributed so unevenly across class and race.

Competing perspectives: strain, labeling, control, and their critics Intermediate

This section sets out the central claim of each theory alongside its principal critiques and updates.

Strain and anomie: from Merton to Agnew and Messner–Rosenfeld

Merton's 1938 argument linked the universal pressure to succeed to unequal access to legitimate means. Its strength is structural: it locates the cause of deviance in the organization of society rather than in individual character, and it correctly predicts that deviance concentrates where opportunity is thin. Its weaknesses are well known. It over-predicts lower-class crime, since the poor are not the only innovators; it under-predicts middle-class and white-collar deviance, which Sutherland's work later made visible; and it treats the cultural goal of success as monolithic, neglecting subcultures that define success on their own terms.

Robert Agnew's general strain theory (1992) broadened the concept of strain beyond blocked economic goals. Strain, for Agnew, is any relationship in which a person is treated adversely — by losing something valued, by being threatened, or by being denied a positively valued stimulus. Negative affective states, especially anger and frustration, mediate the link between strain and crime; whether strain leads to crime depends on coping resources and conditioning factors. The update keeps the structural insight while explaining why most strained people do not offend and why middle-class crime occurs.

Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory moves the analysis from the individual to the society. They argue that anomie is built into the institutional order when the economy dominates the family, the school, and politics. The "American Dream" itself — the cultural insistence on success at any cost — is criminogenic, because it devalues non-economic roles and pressures people to cut corners across every institution.

Labeling theory: from Becker to the empirical record

Becker's 1963 account, building on Lemert's primary/secondary distinction, made three moves at once: it shifted attention from the deviant act to the social reaction; it located the power to define in moral entrepreneurs and rule-making groups; and it predicted that labeling amplifies the very deviance it condemns. The theory's political charge is that the same behavior is treated differently depending on who commits it and who observes it — a prediction the literature on school discipline and criminal justice consistently supports.

The theory hit empirical turbulence in the 1980s. Robert Sampson's randomized and quasi-experimental studies found that official labels do not always amplify subsequent deviance as much as the strong form of the theory predicts. The obituary was premature. School-discipline research (Peguero and Bondy) and court-processing studies continue to show racial labeling effects; Bernburg, Krohn, and McCall found that official intervention increases subsequent deviance net of prior behavior; and Paternoster and Iovanni's meta-analysis concluded that the amplification effect is real but conditional. The contemporary revival treats labeling as one mechanism among several, strongest where the label is public, durable, and tied to institutional exclusion.

Control theory: from Hirschi to life-course and self-control

Hirschi's 1969 social-bond account explained conformity rather than deviance, and its four bonds gave empirical researchers measurable variables. The account's limitation is that it explains why people do not deviate but not why some who are strongly bonded still offend, and it says little about how bonds form.

Gottfredson and Hirschi's 1990 general theory of crime consolidated the account around a single trait — low self-control, established in early childhood by poor parenting — that predicts offending across the life course. Critics object that self-control is close to tautological with the behavior it is meant to explain, and that it underweights adult turning points.

Robert Sampson and John Laub's life-course theory, developed in Crime in the Making (1993) from a reanalysis of the Glueck data, supplied what self-control theory lacked: the idea that adult social bonds — marriage, stable employment, military service — can "knife off" a criminal career even among those with poor childhood prospects. Laub and Sampson's follow-up, Shared Beginnings, Distinguished Lives (2006), traces age-graded informal social control across the whole life. Terrie Moffitt's typology distinguishes adolescence-limited offenders, whose deviance mirrors peer behavior and desists with maturity, from life-course-persistent offenders, whose early neuropsychological deficits and adverse environments sustain offending across decades.

Learning, subcultural, conflict, and feminist theories

Sutherland's differential association and Akers's social learning theory explain deviance as learned within intimate groups; the mechanism is transmission of definitions and reinforcement, not strain or labeling. Albert Cohen argued that working-class boys, unable to meet middle-class standards in school, experience status frustration and invert the values that humiliated them, forming a delinquent subculture whose hostility is an act of group defense. Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin added that the kind of deviance available depends on the local illegitimate opportunity structure: where organized crime is present, criminal subcultures form; where it is absent, conflict subcultures (gang violence) or retreatist subcultures (addiction) appear.

Conflict theory (Quinney, Chambliss, Spitzer) treats criminal law as an instrument of class power, criminalizing the poor while shielding the wealthy. Chambliss's distinction between "rough law" and "smooth law" captures the asymmetry: the same behavior — drug use, violence, fraud — is policed aggressively when committed by the poor and treated leniently when committed by the affluent. Feminist theories (Chesney-Lind, Heimer and De Coster, Daly) argue that mainstream criminology neglected women's offending by treating the male experience as the default. Meda Chesney-Lind showed that girls' victimization — especially sexual abuse — is tightly linked to their later offending, and that the system responds to girls' status offenses (running away, truancy) with incarceration rather than protection. Karen Heimer and Stacy De Coster trace gendered strain through differential socialization, and Kathleen Daly maps gendered pathways into crime shaped by trauma, poverty, and caretaking responsibilities.

Exercise Intermediate

Social theory: Becker, Merton, and Hirschi revisited Master

Becker revisited: careers, moral entrepreneurship, and the question of value-freedom

Becker's work extends beyond the core labeling argument. "Becoming a Marihuana User" (1953) traced a deviant career step by step — learning the technique, learning to perceive the effects, learning to enjoy them — and showed that even drug use is a learned social practice rather than a spontaneous pathology. The analysis became a template for studying how deviant identities are acquired. His essay "Whose Side Are We On?" (1967) argued that value-free sociology is impossible: every research decision — what to study, whom to interview, how to frame results — takes a side, and the sociologist's only honest option is to acknowledge it.

Moral entrepreneurship, in Becker's hands, is a species of social movement. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was driven by Harry Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which manufactured a moral panic around a drug most Americans had never encountered; temperance and Prohibition followed a similar logic, as reformers turned a drinking habit into a federal crusade. The pattern generalizes: behaviors become crimes because organized campaigns make them so, and the campaigns succeed or fail on political power, not on the harm the behavior causes.

Labeling's empirical decline and revival

Sampson's work in the 1980s found that official labels amplified subsequent deviance less than the strong form of labeling theory predicted, and the theory lost standing for a decade. The revival came from several directions. Bernburg, Krohn, and McCall showed that official intervention increases later deviance net of prior behavior; Peguero and Bondy documented racial labeling effects in school discipline; Paternoster and Iovanni's meta-analysis concluded that amplification is real but conditional, strongest where the label is public and tied to institutional exclusion. Modern restorative justice can be read as an anti-labeling intervention: by avoiding a formal criminal record, it aims to interrupt the cascade from primary to secondary deviance.

Merton revisited: general strain and institutional anomie

Agnew's general strain theory reframes strain as negative relationships — being mistreated, losing what one values, being denied what one expects — with anger and frustration as the affective bridge to crime. Whether strain produces crime depends on coping resources, social support, and the availability of legitimate outlets, which explains why most strained people do not offend. Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory lifts Merton to the societal level: anomie is structural when the economy dominates the family, education, and polity, and the American Dream — success at any cost — is itself criminogenic because it devalues non-economic roles.

Life-course theory: turning points and persistent offenders

Sampson and Laub's reanalysis of the Glueck data, in Crime in the Making (1993), found that childhood predictors matter but adult turning points — marriage, stable employment, military service — can redirect even high-risk trajectories. The mechanism is age-graded informal social control: bonds formed in adulthood can "knife off" a criminal career. Laub and Sampson's Shared Beginnings, Distinguished Lives (2006) followed the same men into old age. Moffitt's typology distinguishes adolescence-limited offenders, whose deviance mirrors peers and desists with maturity, from life-course-persistent offenders, whose early neuropsychological deficits and adverse environments sustain offending across decades — though even here, the Glueck data show that desistance is the norm rather than the exception.

Cultural criminology, green criminology, and the boundaries of crime

Cultural criminology (Ferrell, Hayward, Young) insists that crime carries meaning, emotion, and subcultural style, and that the thrill of transgression is part of its appeal. Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect studied East Harlem crack dealers as men searching for dignity under structural exclusion, and Kathryn Edin and others have traced the economic rationality of the underground drug trade. Green criminology (South, Beirne) expands the category of crime to environmental harm — illegal wildlife trade, industrial pollution, environmental injustice inflicted on poor and minority communities — arguing that the most serious harms are often legal rather than criminal. State and corporate crime scholarship (Sutherland, Simon, Chambliss, Friedrichs) makes the parallel move for the powerful: Sutherland insisted that white-collar crime is real crime; Chambliss's On the Take treated organized crime as a normal element of urban political economy; and Friedrichs extended the analysis to state-corporate crime and the crimes of globalization, in which development policy itself robs the poor.

Restorative and peacemaking criminology

John Braithwaite's Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) distinguished reintegrative shaming — condemning the act while keeping the person within the community — from stigmatizing shaming, which expels the person and, as labeling theory predicts, deepens deviance. Braithwaite took Japanese criminal justice as a model of shame without stigmatization and argued that reintegrative shaming reduces reoffending where prison fails. Howard Zehr's Changing Lenses (1990) framed restorative justice as a paradigm shift from retributive to restorative questions — not "what law was broken and how should the offender be punished?" but "who was harmed and how do we repair it?" Peacemaking criminology (Pepinsky and Quinney) goes further, drawing on Quaker, Buddhist, and feminist traditions to propose nonviolent alternatives to the criminal justice system itself, treating punishment as part of the cycle of violence it claims to end.

Connections Master

• Deviance and social control 30.06.01 supplies the foundation. This unit narrows the lens to the three families of theory — strain, labeling, control — that the overview unit introduced, and adds the learning, subcultural, conflict, and feminist accounts that complete the theoretical map of deviance.

• Criminal justice 30.06.02 pending supplies the empirical picture these theories explain. Mass incarceration, racial disparities at every stage, and the war on drugs are the phenomena strain theory (blocked opportunity), labeling theory (differential application of labels), and control theory (weakened bonds) are built to account for.

• Social stratification [30.04.01, 30.04.02, 30.04.03, 30.04.04] frames the structural premise. Merton's strain is a mechanism of class stratification; Chambliss's rough and smooth law is a mechanism of racial stratification; feminist strain theory connects gender stratification to offending through differential socialization and victimization.

• Socialization and identity [30.03.01, 30.03.03] connects through Hirschi's attachment bond, Sutherland's learned definitions, and Becker's master status — all of which treat deviance as a product of the socialization process rather than of innate disposition.

• Social psychology 29.07.01 connects through self-control (Gottfredson-Hirschi), the affective states that mediate strain (Agnew's anger and frustration), and the social-learning mechanism (Akers), which sit at the border where sociological and psychological explanation meet.

Historical and philosophical context Master

The sociology of deviance is a twentieth-century construction with deeper roots. Durkheim's 1895 claim that crime is normal — that it clarifies moral boundaries and that a society without it would be pathologically conformist — set the functionalist baseline against which later theories react. Merton's 1938 "Social Structure and Anomie" imported the tension between goals and means from European anomie theory (Durkheim's own Suicide) and gave it an American, opportunity-focused form. Sutherland's 1939 differential association moved the explanation from structure to learning, treating crime as behavior transmitted through intimate groups.

The symbolic-interactionist turn came after the Second World War. Lemert's 1951 distinction between primary and secondary deviance, and Becker's 1963 Outsiders, shifted the question from "why do people deviate?" to "who gets labeled, and what does the label do?" Hirschi's 1969 Causes of Delinquency reasserted the structural question from the opposite direction, asking not why people break rules but why they keep them.

The 1980s and 1990s saw both consolidation and revision. Gottfredson and Hirschi's 1990 general theory reduced the four bonds to one trait — self-control — while Sampson and Laub's 1993 life-course theory restored the importance of adult turning points. Agnew's 1992 general strain theory broadened Merton, and Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory scaled him up to the societal level. Labeling theory, declared dead after Sampson's critiques, was revived by school-discipline and court-processing research. The contemporary field is less a contest among rival theories than a division of labor: strain accounts for the pressure, labeling for the power to define, control for the bonds that resist, and life-course theory for the turning points that redirect.

Bibliography Master

1. Giddens, A. & Sutton, P. W. — Sociology, 8th ed. (Polity, 2017), Ch. 13 "Crime and deviance theory." Standard introductory treatment of functionalist, strain, labeling, control, learning, and conflict theories of deviance.

2. Macionis, J. J. — Sociology, 17th ed. (Pearson, 2019), Ch. 8 "Deviance." Widely used introductory text covering the major theoretical traditions and their policy implications.

3. Becker, H. S. — Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (Free Press, 1963). The founding statement of labeling theory: deviance as the application of rules, moral entrepreneurs, and deviant careers.

4. Becker, H. S. — "Becoming a Marihuana User," American Journal of Sociology 59(3) (1953), 235–242. The deviant-career sequence — learning the technique, perceiving the effects, learning to enjoy them — as a model for acquired deviant identities.

5. Becker, H. S. — "Whose Side Are We On?," Social Problems 14(3) (1967), 239–247. The argument that value-free sociology is impossible and that every research decision takes a side.

6. Merton, R. K. — "Social Structure and Anomie," American Sociological Review 3(5) (1938), 672–682. The founding statement of strain theory: the disjunction between cultural goals and institutionalized means, and the five adaptations.

7. Durkheim, É. — The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895/1982), pp. 96–102 on the normality of crime. The functionalist baseline: deviance clarifies moral boundaries and affirms cultural values.

8. Lemert, E. M. — Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1951). The primary/secondary deviance distinction that Becker built upon.

9. Goffman, E. — Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Prentice-Hall, 1963). The extension of labeling to stigma — the spoiled identity that follows the labeled person into every interaction.

10. Hirschi, T. — Causes of Delinquency (University of California Press, 1969). The founding statement of social control theory: the four bonds — attachment, commitment, involvement, belief — that hold people in line.

11. Gottfredson, M. R. & Hirschi, T. — A General Theory of Crime (Stanford University Press, 1990). The consolidation of control theory around a single trait — low self-control, established in early childhood — that predicts offending across the life course.

12. Sutherland, E. H. — Principles of Criminology, 3rd ed. (Lippincott, 1939). The founding statement of differential association: crime as behavior learned through intimate groups.

13. Akers, R. L. — Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance (Northeastern University Press, 1998). The Burgess-Akers update of differential association with operant conditioning.

14. Cohen, A. K. — Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (Free Press, 1955). Status frustration: working-class boys invert the middle-class values that humiliated them.

15. Cloward, R. A. & Ohlin, L. E. — Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (Free Press, 1960). Illegitimate opportunity structures and the criminal, conflict, and retreatist subcultures they produce.

16. Agnew, R. — "Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency," Criminology 30(1) (1992), 47–88. Strain as negative relationships; anger and frustration as the affective bridge to crime.

17. Messner, S. F. & Rosenfeld, R. — Crime and the American Dream, 3rd ed. (Wadsworth, 2001). Institutional anomie theory: the economy's dominance over other institutions makes the American Dream itself criminogenic.

18. Sampson, R. J. & Laub, J. H. — Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Harvard University Press, 1993). Reanalysis of the Glueck data; childhood predictors and adult turning points that knife off criminal careers.

19. Laub, J. H. & Sampson, R. J. — Shared Beginnings, Distinguished Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Harvard University Press, 2006). Age-graded informal social control traced across the whole life course.

20. Moffitt, T. E. — "Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy," Psychological Review 100(4) (1993), 674–701. The two-type taxonomy of offending.

21. Bernburg, J. G., Krohn, M. D. & Rivera, C. J. — "Official Labeling, Criminal Embeddedness, and Subsequent Delinquency," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43(1) (2006), 67–88. Official intervention increases later deviance net of prior behavior.

22. Braithwaite, J. — Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Reintegrative shaming distinguished from stigmatizing shaming; the theoretical foundation of restorative justice.

23. Zehr, H. — Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Herald Press, 1990). Restorative justice as a paradigm shift from retributive to restorative questions.

24. Bourgois, P. — In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge University Press, 1995). East Harlem crack dealers as men searching for dignity under structural exclusion.

25. Chambliss, W. J. — On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents, 2nd ed. (Indiana University Press, 1988). Organized crime as a normal element of urban political economy; rough law versus smooth law.

26. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K. & Young, J. — Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (Sage, 2008). Meaning, emotion, and subcultural style in crime and transgression.

27. South, N. & Beirne, P. (eds.) — Green Criminology (Ashgate, 2006). Environmental harm as crime: illegal wildlife trade, pollution, and environmental injustice.