Last Updated on September 11, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Subcultural theories argue that crime is a group response to a shared problem, not an individual one. The three you need are:
- Albert Cohen (1955) — status frustration
- Cloward and Ohlin (1960) — the illegitimate opportunity structure and three types of subculture
- Walter Miller (1958) — the six focal concerns of lower working-class culture
Subcultural theory sits directly after functionalism and strain theory in the crime and deviance module, and it exists because of a specific gap in Merton.
Why subcultural theory exists: the problem with Merton
Merton’s strain theory explains crime as an individual adaptation to the gap between goals and means. A person who cannot get rich legitimately innovates and gets rich illegitimately.
Two things that theory cannot explain.
Most delinquency achieves nothing. Vandalism, joyriding, graffiti and fighting are not means to material success. They cost the offender time and risk and produce no money. Merton has no category for crime that isn’t for anything.
Most delinquency happens in groups. Merton’s adaptations are choices made by isolated individuals. Actual youth offending is overwhelmingly social.
Subcultural theory was built to answer both. Its move is to say that the response to strain is collective, and that what is being pursued is not money but status.
Albert Cohen (1955): status frustration
Cohen agreed with Merton that working-class boys face a structural problem, but disagreed about what the problem was.
Schools, Cohen argued, judge everyone by middle-class standards — deferred gratification, politeness, ambition, neat work. Working-class boys arrive without the cultural preparation to meet those standards and end up at the bottom of the school’s status hierarchy. Cohen called the resulting experience status frustration: not poverty, but humiliation.
Some of these boys find each other, and together they do something clever. They invert the value system. In the subculture they form, status is awarded for exactly what the school punishes — truanting, fighting, vandalism, insolence. A boy who is a failure by the school’s measure can be a success by the subculture’s.
This explains the thing Merton could not. The delinquency is non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic by design, because its whole function is to be the opposite of the value system that rejected them. Smashing a window earns no money, but it earns status precisely because the school would hate it.
Cloward and Ohlin (1960): the illegitimate opportunity structure
Cloward and Ohlin accepted Cohen’s account but asked a further question: why do different deviant groups do different things?
Their answer is that Merton only looked at access to legitimate opportunity. Access to illegitimate opportunity is also unequally distributed. Not every frustrated young person has an adult criminal network available to be recruited into. What you become depends on which illegitimate opportunity structure exists where you live.
They identified three types of subculture:
- Criminal subcultures develop in stable working-class areas with an established adult criminal hierarchy. There is a career ladder to climb, so the crime is organised, utilitarian and directed at money. Young people are apprenticed into it.
- Conflict subcultures develop where the population is unstable and no such hierarchy exists. With no criminal career available, status is won through violence and territory instead. Gang fighting is the characteristic activity.
- Retreatist subcultures are made up of those who fail in both the legitimate structure and the illegitimate one — Cloward and Ohlin’s double failures. Unable to succeed at crime either, they retreat into drug use.
The three types are the single most examinable thing on this page. Learn them as a set, with the condition that produces each one.
Walter Miller (1958): focal concerns
Miller took a different line from both. Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin see delinquent subcultures as a reaction to mainstream values; Miller argued that the lower working class has its own long-standing culture which was never a reaction to anything.
That culture, he said, is organised around six focal concerns:
- Trouble — accepting that trouble is a normal part of life, and a degree of status in handling it
- Toughness — physical prowess and not backing down
- Smartness — the ability to outwit others, street-smart rather than school-smart
- Excitement — the search for thrills, and a rhythm of routine punctuated by risk
- Fate — a belief that life is governed by luck rather than effort
- Autonomy — resentment of authority and of being told what to do
Miller’s argument is that a young man simply living out these values will end up in trouble with the law without ever intending to rebel against anything. Crime is a by-product of ordinary conformity to a different culture.
Charles Murray: underclass theory
Writing in the late 1980s, Charles Murray argued that a distinct underclass had formed in Britain, characterised by long-term worklessness, high rates of lone parenthood and dependence on benefits — and that its children were being socialised into the same pattern.
This is subcultural theory taken to its most politically charged conclusion, and it is covered in full in the post on the underclass theory of crime, along with the evidence against it.
Positive evaluations of subcultural theories
Subcultural theory explains what strain theory cannot: crime that achieves no material goal, and crime committed in groups. That is a genuine advance, and it is why the specification teaches the two together.
It takes the offender’s own perspective seriously. Cohen’s boys are not simply failing at conventional life; they are succeeding at something else. That is a more respectful and more accurate account of how young people actually experience school.
Cloward and Ohlin’s insight that illegitimate opportunity is also unequally distributed is powerful and has held up. It explains regional and neighbourhood variation in the type of crime, which no other theory of the period attempts.
The theories generated a huge body of ethnographic research and remain the foundation for how criminologists study gangs.
Criticisms of subcultural theories
They rely on official statistics. All three theories start from the observation that offending is concentrated in the working class — a claim taken from statistics that interactionists argue record police attention rather than behaviour. If the working class is over-represented because it is over-policed, the phenomenon these theories set out to explain may be partly an artefact.
They ignore the role of labelling. Subcultures do not simply form and then get noticed. Being labelled is part of how they form. The theories treat the reaction of teachers, police and media as external to the process when it is arguably internal to it.
They are almost entirely about boys. Feminists point out that the founding studies are studies of young men, that female offending is barely addressed, and that the values described as “lower working class” are more accurately described as masculine.
Cohen assumes the boys accepted mainstream values first. The whole mechanism depends on them having wanted middle-class status and been denied it. If they never wanted it, there is no frustration to invert. Miller’s account is the internal criticism here — his focal concerns describe a culture that is not reacting to the mainstream at all.
Contemporary subcultures do not look like this. Modern research finds gang membership far more fluid, less territorial and less permanent than the mid-century American studies assumed, and finds far more subcultures than any of these typologies allow for.
Marxists argue all three theories look downwards. They explain working-class crime in detail and elite crime not at all.
Contemporary evidence to evaluate subcultural theory (2026 update)
Retreatist subcultures and the collapse in youth drug use
Cloward and Ohlin’s retreatist subculture is built on drug use as a response to double failure. The ONS drug misuse figures for the year ending March 2025 make that hard to sustain as a description of young people today.
Drug use among 16–24 year olds has fallen from a peak of 31.8% in 1997 to 15.1% — less than half. Over the same period use among people aged 45–54 has risen. The age gap is narrowing because the young stopped, not because the old started.
Youth binge drinking has moved the same way. The proportion of 16–24 year old men drinking eight or more units in a session fell from 37% in 1998 to 17% in 2022, while the figure for men of all ages stayed flat at around 19%.
HOWEVER, this cuts both ways. If retreatism were a structural response to blocked opportunity, it should be rising — youth unemployment and NEET rates are both up. It is falling sharply instead, which suggests the behaviour was cultural and generational rather than a mechanical response to strain.
Cohen’s status frustration and the anti-social behaviour figures
The Crime Survey for England and Wales, year ending March 2026 reports that 40.9% of people experienced or witnessed anti-social behaviour, up from 35.5%, though the ONS notes a change in question wording from April 2025 inflated part of that rise.
Non-utilitarian nuisance behaviour is exactly what Cohen’s theory predicts and what Merton’s cannot accommodate, so this is supporting evidence — with the important caveat that a measurement change is doing some of the work, which is itself a good methods point.
Shoplifting: utilitarian crime that fits Merton better
Police recorded shoplifting fell 4% to 507,086 offences in the year to March 2026, after several years of increases. The ONS notes that recent rises reflect both genuine growth and much closer reporting between retailers and police.
Shoplifting is utilitarian, frequently solitary, and aimed straight at material goods. It is innovation in Merton’s sense and it does not need a subculture to explain it. Where the crime is about money, strain theory remains the better tool — which is a useful reminder that these theories divide the work between them rather than competing for all of it.
Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my crime and deviance revision notes bundle — which contains the following:
- Revision notes covering all fifteen topics on the crime and deviance specification
- Mind maps in pdf and png format
- Short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
- Essay plans and model answers for the 30-mark questions
Signposting / Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, examined on Paper 3.
Subcultural theory only makes sense against the theory it was built to repair, so read The Functionalist Perspective on Crime and Deviance and Merton’s Strain Theory first if you haven’t.
The most politically contested version of subcultural theory is covered in The Underclass Theory of Crime.
For research on how subcultures actually operate, see Sociological Research on Gangs.
The consensus alternative to all of this is Hirschi’s Social Control Theory, which asks why most young people don’t offend at all.
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