Merton’s Strain Theory of Deviance

Last Updated on September 11, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Robert Merton’s Strain Theory of Deviance (1938) remains one of the most influential explanations of crime and deviance in sociology. Building on Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie, Merton argued that crime occurs when there is a strain between society’s cultural goals (such as wealth and success) and the legitimate means available to achieve them. When opportunities are blocked, some individuals innovate — often through deviant or criminal behaviour — to achieve socially approved goals.

Merton developed this theory in the late 1930s to explain why crime persisted in a society growing richer, and its relevance extends to contemporary societies today, from fraud to mass shootings.

What is Strain Theory?

Strain Theory argues that crime occurs when there are not enough legitimate opportunities for people to achieve society’s success goals. This creates a strain between aspirations and reality, pushing some individuals toward deviance.

The American Dream and the Roots of Strain

Merton argued that the cultural system of the USA was built on the ‘American Dream’. This was a set of meritocratic principles which assured the American public that equality of opportunity was available to all, regardless of class, gender or ethnicity.

The ‘American Dream’ encouraged individuals to pursue a goal of success which was largely measured in terms of the acquisition of wealth and material possessions. People were expected to pursue this goal through legitimate means such as education and work. The dominant cultural message was that if you are ambitious, talented and work hard, then income and wealth should be your rewards.

However Merton pointed out that these goals were not attainable by all. The structural organisation of the USA meant that the means to get on were not fairly distributed. It was difficult, if not impossible, for some to compete and achieve financial success.

Merton developed the concept of ‘anomie’ to describe this imbalance between cultural goals and institutionalised means. He argued that such an imbalanced society produces anomie — there is a strain or tension between the goals and means which produces unsatisfied aspirations.

A note on the word. Durkheim and Merton both use ‘anomie’ and they do not mean the same thing. For Durkheim it is an absence or breakdown of norms. For Merton it is a contradiction between the goals a society prescribes and the means it makes available. Do not treat the two as interchangeable in an essay.

Anomie and Crime

According to Merton, anomie is a socially produced condition of deregulation and discontent that generates deviance. Society promises success to everyone but denies equal access to achievement.

For example, a poor, inner-city teenager may be motivated to succeed but faces barriers such as underfunded schools, racial prejudice, or a lack of employment opportunities. Failure is often interpreted as a personal weakness rather than a structural problem, producing guilt instead of political anger.

The pressure to succeed can be so powerful that disadvantaged individuals resort to illegitimate means — theft, drug dealing, or fraud — to achieve the same success goals.

As Merton puts it:

‘The culture makes incompatible demands… In this setting, a cardinal American virtue – “ambition” – promotes a cardinal American vice – “deviant behaviour”‘

Merton (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure

Merton’s Five Adaptations to Strain

Merton identified five ways people adapt when faced with the strain between goals and means:

Adaptation	Description	Example
Conformity	Accepts cultural goals and pursues them through legitimate means.	Working hard for promotion.
Innovation	Accepts goals but uses illegitimate means to achieve them.	Selling drugs, theft, or fraud.
Ritualism	Abandons cultural goals but rigidly follows social rules.	A bureaucrat who follows rules without ambition.
Retreatism	Rejects both goals and means, retreating from society.	Alcoholism, addiction, homelessness.
Rebellion	Rejects both existing goals and means and replaces them with new ones.	Revolutionaries and political radicals.

Four of the five adaptations are deviant. Only conformity is not. Students routinely count three, because ritualism looks law-abiding — but the ritualist has rejected the cultural goal, and in Merton’s scheme that is what makes an adaptation deviant. It is the commonest error on this topic.

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Strain Theory, Social Class and Crime

Merton’s strain theory can be applied to explain why there is a higher rate of crime among the working classes.

Merton developed his theory from a well-established observation from official statistics — that a higher proportion of acquisitive crime is committed by those from unskilled manual backgrounds (or ‘lower social classes’).

Merton noted that American society promoted material success as a ‘legitimate goal’, and encouraged self-discipline and hard work as the ‘legitimate means’ of pursuing that goal, with the idea that any individual, irrespective of their background, could with sufficient effort achieve material success.

HOWEVER, Merton argued that for those from lower social classes this ‘dream’ had become an ideology, masking the fact that legitimate opportunities are not available to all, and worse, those who failed to achieve success via legitimate means were condemned for their apparent lack of effort.

This situation puts great pressure on people to achieve material success by illegitimate means (acquisitive crime) to avoid being branded a failure.

In short, Merton argued that America was a highly unequal and divided society which promoted goals that only some of its population could realistically hope to achieve. Many young working-class men especially had internalised the desire to achieve material success — they wanted cars and nice clothes, for example — but the only way they could meet these goals was through crime.

Thus it is not so much the individual’s flaws that lead them to crime, but rather ‘anomie’ in society: the combination of the pressure to be materially successful and the lack of legitimate opportunities to achieve that success.

Evaluation of Merton’s Strain Theory

Strengths

• Links personal behaviour to wider social structure.
• Explains economic and utilitarian crimes effectively.
• Offers a useful framework for analysing modern capitalist societies.
• It is testable. Where the gap between aspiration and opportunity widens, the theory predicts more innovation — a claim that can be checked against data, which is more than can be said for some theories on this specification.

Limitations

• Not all working-class individuals turn to crime — it doesn’t explain individual differences.
• Over-relies on official statistics, underestimating middle-class and white-collar crime.
• Doesn’t explain non-economic crimes such as violence or vandalism.
• Marxists argue it fails to challenge capitalism itself, which relies on inequality and exploitation.
• It assumes a value consensus around material success. Marxists call that consensus ideology; postmodernists deny that any single dominant goal survives in a fragmented society.
• It explains individual adaptations, not group ones — most youth offending happens in groups.

Subcultural theories later developed Merton’s ideas, arguing that deviant subcultures provide their own rewards and values to those excluded from mainstream success.

👉 Related: Functionalist explanations of deviance 👉 Related: Subcultural theories of crime

The Continuing Relevance of Strain Theory

• Merton’s strain theory is an important contribution to the study of crime and deviance — in the mid-twentieth century it helped explain why crime continued to exist in countries such as America which were experiencing increasing economic growth and wealth.
• Baumer and Gustafson (2007) analysed official data sets in the USA and found that instrumental crime rates were higher in areas where there was a ‘high commitment to money success’ alongside a ‘weak commitment to legitimate means’.
• It is possible to apply Merton’s theory of anomie to explain white collar crime. Those who commit fraud at work might be people committed to achieving material success who have had their opportunities for promotion blocked — possibly through class, gender or ethnic bias, or simply because the higher up the career ladder you go, the more competition there is.
• Philip Bourgois (1996), In Search of Respect, shows us that some of the most despised criminals have actually internalised Merton’s success goals.
• Carl Nightingale, On the Edge, developed Merton’s strain theory, applying it to inner-city youths in the 1990s.
• Strain theory has also been applied outside the West — including to rising crime rates during a period of economic growth in Malaysia — which suggests the theory travels, and that a ‘general theory of crime’ may be possible. [AUTHOR NEEDED — see the note below]

Applying Strain Theory to Mass Shootings in America…

Merton’s Strain Theory can be applied to explain the rise in mass shootings in recent years in the United States. However, we need to take into account more than just Strain Theory. We also need to recognise that mass shooters tend to be white, working class men. Thus the ‘crisis of masculinity’ has a lot to do with the increasing trend of mass shootings too.

Kalish and Kimmel (2010) argue that a culture of hegemonic masculinity in the US creates a sense of aggrieved entitlement conducive to violence.

Today in America young men face barriers to achieving traditional markers of male success. Getting a decent paying job, buying a house and finding a partner are all harder than ever. There are a significant number of young men who fail to achieve any of these normal masculine success goals. Many men feel they are entitled to these things, which is part of patriarchy. Not achieving these goals means lots of men feeling anxious and their masculine sense of identity threatened.

When this happens, some of these men blame others for taking their opportunities away from them. Some of them (wrongly) blame ethnic minorities for taking their jobs, houses and women. Some enact these feelings through mass-murdering ethnic minorities.

This kind of white-male racist reaction has a long history in America, as outlined in this article in The Conversation.

The article above also notes that many of these mass shootings end with the shooter committing suicide. Suicide fits in with the masculine narrative: a pre-planned, successful suicide is the final way a young man can assert their masculine identity. (This may sound bonkers, but read the article, it’s in there!)

This is strain theory doing something Merton never anticipated. The blocked goal is not money but masculinity, and the innovation is not theft but violence. It shows the framework is more flexible than the 1938 paper suggests.

Strain Theory and the Crime Figures (2026 update)

Two current trends, pulling in opposite directions.

Fraud is innovation, and it is now half of all crime

The ONS’s Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026 recorded 4.5 million fraud incidents, up around 32% since 2017. Against 2.6 million thefts and 989,000 violent incidents, fraud is now close to half of all crime the survey measures.

Fraud is innovation in its purest form — a wholly illegitimate means to an entirely conventional goal.

HOWEVER, look at who commits it. Fraud at this scale requires technical skill, capital and access, which is not the profile of someone locked out of legitimate opportunity. This is exactly the criticism Marxists make: the goal–means gap does not explain why people who already have the means innovate anyway.

The traditional crimes have collapsed, and strain theory does not predict it

Over the same period the crimes Merton’s theory was built to explain have fallen sharply. Since the mid-1990s peak: theft is down 77%, violence down 78% and criminal damage down 81%.

The strain has not gone anywhere. Inequality has not fallen, and youth worklessness has risen — there were 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training in April to June 2026, according to the House of Commons Library, having passed a million in the first quarter of 2026 for the first time since 2013.

Strain theory predicts that a widening gap between aspiration and opportunity produces more innovation. Acquisitive street crime has fallen by three quarters while the gap widened. Something other than strain is doing the work, and this is the hardest single fact for the theory to absorb.

Conclusion

Merton’s Strain Theory remains one of sociology’s most powerful frameworks for explaining the social causes of crime. It highlights how the promise of equal opportunity can mask deep inequalities that push some people toward deviance.

By connecting structural inequality, cultural values and individual behaviour, Merton provided a foundation for many later theories — from subcultural theory to modern analyses of consumerism and masculinity.

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Signposting/ Related Posts 

Merton’s Strain Theory is taught as part of consensus theory within the A-level sociology Crime and Deviance syllabus.

Other consensus theories include:

• The Functionalist Theory of Crime
• The ‘Social Control’ Theory of Crime
• Subcultural Theories of Deviance 

References

1. Merton, R. K. (1938) ‘Social Structure and Anomie’, American Sociological Review, 3(5), pp. 672–682.
2. Merton, R. K. (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure. Revised edn. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
3. Baumer, E. P. and Gustafson, R. (2007) ‘Social Organization and Instrumental Crime: Assessing the Empirical Validity of Classic and Contemporary Anomie Theories’, Criminology, 45(3), pp. 617–663. [JOURNAL TO CONFIRM — see note]
4. Bourgois, P. (1996) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Nightingale, C. H. (1993) On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams. New York: Basic Books.
6. Kalish, R. and Kimmel, M. (2010) ‘Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings’, Health Sociology Review, 19(4), pp. 451–464.
7. Office for National Statistics (2026) Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026.
8. House of Commons Library, Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), Research Briefing SN06705.