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The Blog, now in its 10th year, features resources for teachers and students of Sociology, Psychology and Criminology and contains a mix of Revision Resources, Notes, Lesson Plans, PowerPoint Presentations, Films, Digested Research and more.

Search the nearly 1000 posts if you’re looking for something specific, browse the different Categories for more-general exploration, or simply read the latest posts on the Home Page (and follow the Related Research suggestions at the end of each Post to discover similar Posts).

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PowerPoint: The ABC of Investigating

This spin-off from the burgeoning Sociological Detectives Universe™ is a vehicle by which you can simply and not-a-little-secretly introduce a soupcon of Study Skills into what we’re contractually obliged to call “The Student eXperience” (sic).

In other words this PowerPoint Presentation is a slightly different way to encourage your students to take information you provide (via lectures, handouts, books, video, audio or whatever else you use) and do something more with it than simply store it neatly away somewhere.

And the “more” in this instance involves three simple tasks (Attach, Broaden and Challenge (hence the “ABC” method) that will help your students master some simple – but hugely effective – study skills without really being aware this is what they’re doing).

study skills

Although the Presentation has been designed (yes, really) to be fairly self-explicable there’s a couple of things you might want to note before launching it upon unsuspecting students.

Firstly, you need to provide some sort of information they have to analyse / understand. This can take whatever form you want (lecture, book chapter, video, podcast…) so you could, if you want use the Presentation at the end of a lecture to push your students into extending their knowledge and understanding.

Secondly, you can use the Presentation in a couple of different ways, depending on your teaching style and the time available. You could, as I’ve said, introduce it as a whole class exercise. Alternatively you could take a flipped teaching approach whereby your students do the tasks in their own time and then you spend time in the classroom discussing their ideas. If you go down this route it will probably be easiest to run the Presentation past the whole class first so your students can understand what the three tasks involve.

Aside from these choices all you really need to do before you use the Presentation is familiarise yourself with its little foibles. As ever, while the basic mechanics are fairly simple I’ve added a few little twists you’d do well to understand before you let the Presentation loose in the wild.

As ever, for reasons I’ve previously explained and can’t be bothered to explain again (that’s what hyperlinks were invented for. Possibly), I’ve included two versions of the Presentation:

Choose PowerPoint Presentation if you want to have a look at how I’ve put it together (or if you want to alter any of the text. Each task currently requires students to identify one idea, you might want them to do more…). A word of warning here. Because the Presentation uses the Morph function that’s not available in earlier versions of PowerPoint you need to make sure you’ve got a reasonably up-to-date version available (such as PowerPoint 365) if you want to poke around changing stuff.

Choose PowerPoint Show for a standalone version that doesn’t require PowerPoint (but might mean you have to negotiate your browser’s over-efficient anti-virus protection).

Podcasts with Pictures: Learning Academy

Another in the “Podcasts with Pictures” series designed to bring to your attention video materials you or your students might find useful. In this instance we have a series of “video lessons” created by The Learning Academy.

Each of the 14 lessons lasts between 10 and 15 minutes and consists of someone talking about a topic while you look at a slide that, by-and-large, contains the information being talked about. Although this is supplemented by a few pictures and direct screen annotations these don’t necessarily add much to the lesson – although to be fair this does vary from lesson to lesson. In some the annotations just mirror what’s presented on-screen while in others they do introduce new information.

learning academy screen

One problem with this approach is that it wastes a lot of time while the viewer watches the narrator annotate the screen while telling us what they’re writing. Why not just prepare the slide beforehand with this information?

That quibble aside – and there are others: the pictures that appear on-screen don’t seem to have much connection to what’s being discussed, small white text on a black background is very tiring to watch – the lessons cover three broad areas:

  • “Introduction to Sociology” gives you a brief overview of the subject.
  • Perspectives introduces 5 approaches (Functionalism, Marxism, Interactionism, Feminism, The New Right)
  • Education covers a slightly-odd amalgam of perspectives, school organisation, labelling, subcultures and identity. These categories are, however slightly-misleading in terms of content because, for whatever reason, more-conventional categories (such as differential educational achievement) seem to be covered. Why they’ve done things this way I can only guess. It may be because they’re trying to cover different Specifications, but I could be wrong.

The content itself is generally sound and there’s a welcome, if slightly obsessive and overdone, focus on intersectionality – although I chanced upon some curious and jarring errors in the films I watched (I didn’t sit through all of them so maybe I was just unlucky).

The Functionalism film, for example, had a section on “Talcott Parson” who apparently viewed society “in a similar way to the functionings of a human body” which is, apparently, an “organic analogy”. While the latter is a common mistake (it’s an “organismic analogy” because it’s based on the idea of bodily organs) this view of society was actually proposed by Herbert Spencer in the 19th century. Parsons (note the “s”) didn’t see society in this simplistic way – it’s just a device we use to help students get a basic grip on the underlying ideas contained in general Functionalist thought.

There was also the rather curious assertion that “Interactionism rejects the concept of socialisation since individuals have free-will to make their own choices” – a statement that illustrates one of the main potential problems with these lessons: they’re not really long enough to cover the stuff they’re aiming to discuss. Things get said that sometimes require further elucidation, otherwise they just sit on the screen looking (and sounding) a bit daft.

There were quite a few other mistakes I picked-up on (the suggestion that the “nuclear family” was a relatively modern (1950’s) invention because “nuclear” was a modern word (it’s not…) kind-of misses the point quite spectacularly) so you need to be a bit careful when using these materials.

Another thing that might be a problem is that the lessons only cover education, a brief Introduction to Sociology and some stuff on Perspectives. Whether there were supposed to be more lessons in the series isn’t clear – there are a couple of mentions of topics like Crime and Deviance – but since all the lessons were made in 2022 I think we should probably infer form this there will be no more.

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit ambivalent about these materials. On the one hand, the format makes them a bit dull at times and they aren’t really long enough to cover topics in any sort of depth. On the other, if you’re looking for some relatively short revision films – particularly for Education – these might help (but if you’re a student it might be useful to ask your teacher to give them the once-over to identify any misconceptions…).

Origins of Sociology: PowerPoint

This new PowerPoint Presentation introduces students to some (okay, 9) of Sociology’s founders, from the Big Three of Marx, Durkheim and Weber to lesser-known, but equally important in their own way, names such as Harriet Martineau and William Du Bois.

And while Sociology Specifications in the UK no-longer feature discrete sections on the Founders of Sociology this doesn’t mean a quick and relatively simple introduction to sociology’s origins isn’t both useful and academically important.

Many of the writers featured in the Presentation are not merely historically significant. Their ideas and work still, in many cases, inform contemporary sociology. They are, in this respect, writers that students will come across time and again throughout their course of study – either as contributors to our understanding of social processes in their own right or, in some cases, founders of, or major contributors to, the various sociological perspectives that seem to form such a large part of the various curricula.

In terms of the Presentation itself, it’s designed to be used in a kiosk style: students view the Presentation individually rather than as a classroom group. And because it’s not the usual kind of

“here’s a load of bullet points that I’m going to show you and then slowly read aloud to you” PowerPoint, the Presentation might take a little getting used to.

Having said that, I’ve included simple Instructions (using a nifty little menu system, of which I’m not a little proud) and once students start to play around with the Presentation they should pick it up fairly quickly.

There are two versions of the Presentation you can download:

1. Origins of Sociology PowerPoint Show is a standalone (.ppsx) version that doesn’t need a copy of PowerPoint to run. It also means that if you have an earlier version of PowerPoint on your system the file will still play. The only downside to using this version is that when you try to download it from this site some browsers will warn you the file is “unsafe”. What they mean is that it could conceivably contain a virus. This warning is given because what you’re downloading is a runtime program – a program that will run automatically once you click it (a bit like an app or an exe file). Since PowerPoint Presentations can contain macro files than can be used to change files in ways that might well be construed as “unwanted” this type of warning is both fair and useful.

Unfortunately, if you don’t have an up-to-date version of PowerPoint (2021 onward) and you load the alternative version I’ve provided into it (see below) then it will very likely not work because earlier versions don’t support the morph and zoom functions used in this Presentation.

If in doubt, therefore, download this version and run it through a virus check (or disable macros in your version of PowerPoint). Since it doesn’t contain macros there is nothing untoward about the file and it’s perfectly safe to run.

2. Origins of Sociology PowerPoint is a version (.pptx) that will load into PowerPoint if you have it on your system. This must be 2021 onward (this includes Microsoft 365) otherwise some of the functioning will get messed-up and the Presentation won’t work as intended (presupposing you can even load this file into earlier versions of PowerPoint).

Situational Action Theory

Click to download copy of SAT
Situational Action Theory

Most a-level teachers and students will probably be most familiar with Per-Olof Wikstrom’s work on the Peterborough Adolescent Development Study (PADS), a longitudinal study of youth crime in a “provincial English town”. One that sits mid-way between the teeming Birmingham metropolis and Norwich. Which, with the best will in the world, can neither be described as “teeming” nor metropolitan. Trust me. I’ve been there.

What you may be less familiar with is situational action theory (SAT), the theory that, among other things, underpins the study.

In basic terms, SAT represents an attempt to understand crime and criminality by integrating two levels of analysis:

  • The individual: this refers to the various processes, such as family socialisation and formative experiences that shape individual moralities – the way in which they see and think about the social world.
  • The situational: this refers to the specific social situations through which the individual moves at various points in their life. It represents, as it were, the contexts against which individual moralities are played-out.

Both an awareness of the significance of these two levels and, perhaps more importantly, how they are integrated is, for Wikstrom, the key to understanding youth crime (an idea we explore in more detail in subsequent posts: Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage and Crime and Social Disadvantage: The Evidence).

This short introduction to Situational Action Theory covers the basic ideas involved and includes examples you can use to sensitise your students to how the theory works.

The subsequent posts noted above can be used to show how the theory has been applied to both understand youth crime and the limitations of various New Right crime theories (such as Routine Activities).

Crime and Social Disadvantage: The Evidence

One of the more-interesting things about the use of Situational Action Theory (SAT) to explore the relationship between crime and social disadvantage is that it developed alongside Wikstrom’s Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+). This longitudinal study of young people’s behaviour in the early part of the 21st century has proven to be both a valuable resource in its own right and, more-importantly perhaps, a rich source of empirical evidence with which to test many of the hypotheses Wikstrom developed out of his application of SAT to an understanding of how and why youth crime occurs.

Peterborough courts

In this final part of what no-one is calling the SAT Trilogy we can examine some of this evidence (the previous parts – Situational Action Theory [coming soon] and Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage – will also be available if you’d like to read them).

As Wikstrom and Trieber (2016) argue, the objective here is “to advance knowledge about the relationship between social disadvantage and crime involvement through the application of situational action theory (SAT) and the analysis of data from a random sample of U.K. adolescents from the longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+).”. To this end we can have a look at a broad overview of what, according to Wikstrom, PADS+ data tells us about both criminal involvement and its relationship to social disadvantage.

Wikstrom’s longitudinal study followed a randomly selected sample of 716 young people, aged 12 – 16, living in and around the English city of Peterborough over a period of 13 years (roughly 2002 – 2015). One of the unique features of the study was that, in line with Wikstrom’s focus on the idea of situational action, it was interested in studying the participants as both individual actors (their sense of moral purpose in particular) and the social environments (situational settings) in which they lived and moved.

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Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage

While the relationship between social disadvantage and crime  has long been known, an important question that’s often ignored is why only a relatively small proportion of the socially disadvantaged seem to engage in persistent criminal offending?

Wikstrom’s Situational Action Theory provides an interesting, thought-provoking, possible answer…

The Crime Paradox

Most A-level crime and deviance students will quickly come to understand the relationship between social disadvantage – what Wikström and Treiber (2016) term “the comparative lack of social and economic resources”- and various forms of persistent, mainly low-level, criminality, overwhelmingly committed by young, lower class, males. Crimes that involve relatively small levels of economic reward (arson, vandalism, theft, shoplifting, robbery, car crime and burglary) or which involve routine low-level violence (assault). In basic terms, social disadvantage is generally seen as a cause of crime.

Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom

The problem with this characterisation, however, is that it’s both true – statistically, most persistent offenders do come from a socially-disadvantaged background (at least as far as the kinds of crimes we’ve just listed are concerned) and not true: social disadvantage doesn’t, in and of itself, cause crime because only a relatively small proportion of those classified as socially disadvantaged become persistent offenders. The majority do not. Which is not something we would expect if the relationship was a causal one.

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GCSE Sociology: Terms and Concepts Visualised

Free online Introductory Sociology Flipbook aimed at GCSE students.

As you may be aware – I may have mentioned it once or twice – I really like the idea of a visual sociology that involves integrating text and graphics to create narratives for students that have much greater appeal than the simple textbooks of yore (or even the more-complex Textbooks of Today that plonk a few pictures next to some text and call it innovative…).

Maybe it was the distant echo of childhood comics – both the bog-standard British and, very, very, occasionally the wonderful world of Marvel and DC – that appealed to my sense of sociology as story-telling.

Until very recently it certainly wasn’t the idea of dual coding information in a way that made it accessible and memorable. That, as they say, was an unintended bonus.

Anyway, while there have been a couple of reasonably-successful attempts to produce visual sociology books, such as Sociology in Pictures (2012) which covers Theories and Concepts and a follow-up (2016) covering Research Methods, the main drawback with these is that they’re print books and hence rather expensive for what you get. Although, given their relative age, you can at least pick up cheap 2nd hand copies.

My favoured format for this kind of endeavour is, of course, Flipbook and Free. I don’t know why but there’s something about being able to flip online pages as if they were a real-world magazine that appeals to my infantile sensibilities.

The “free” part is, of course, optional and it’s rare to come across a publication that combines the two, which is why I was interested to discover Sociology: Terms & Concepts Visualised. Created by Sanjana Saxena for the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) the flipbook combines interesting visuals with short descriptive text on a range of Introductory Sociological Terms (mainly  around the idea of different groups – primary, secondary and the like) and Concepts such as Stratification, status and role. Both the style and content fit the English GCSE curriculum.

One drawback is that the flipbook was published in 2017 and since then Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Which is a bit of a shame because the flipbook is beautifully drawn and will definitely appeal to GCSE students (and teachers) looking for a different, potentially more-interesting, way to get into Sociology.

Crime and Victimisation: 1. Victimology

This section of Crime Notes focuses on a number of different aspects of victimisation with the initial emphasis on the concept of victimology, the social construction of victims and a range of victim-orientated policies introduced into England and Wales in the 21st century.

Over the past 50 or so years there has been a growth of interest in what Maguire et al. (2006) called the ‘experiences and needs of crime victims’ that has informed debates about ‘the relative rights of victims and offenders, policing policy, crime prevention and court processes’. This change of focus, particularly in the UK, from the offender to the offence and the victim, is significant for how crime impacts on three types of victimisation:

  • primary – individual victims
  • secondary – people such as family and friends close to the victim
  • tertiary – the communities in which victims live.

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Dynamic Learning: Metacognition

The 7th film in our Dynamic Learning Series designed to introduce students to a range of important ideas and skills related to the science of studying.

Understandably perhaps, most students spend the vast majority of their study time thinking about what they’re learning, rather than how they’re learning it, on the not-too-questionable  basis that if they can’t learn something they’re unlikely to succeed in examinations that test them on their knowledge of that information.

But there’s increasing evidence that understanding how we learn things can play an important part in actually helping us learn stuff.

And over 30 years of educational research has shown that metacognition – in broad terms, an awareness of how we think – helps students take more control over their learning, improve their grades and become more independent and confident learners.

The objective of this short film, therefore, is to show students how to develop a metacognitive outlook in their your by using three simple interrelated processes – planning, monitoring and reflecting – that can boost their understanding of whatever subjects they’re studying.

Dynamic Learning: Metacognition is available now to Buy or Rent (7 days).

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 6. Left Realism

Short set of Notes on a kind of complementary, albeit less revolutionary, approach to understanding crime and deviance that you can either lump-in with Critical Criminology or treat as a separate, neo-critical, perspective.

Your choice.

But let’s just hope it’s the right one, for everyone’s sake…

Left Realism: A Young Man’s Game?

Young (2003) suggests the job of realism is ‘to tackle all three sides of the deviancy process’. This three-cornered approach addresses the multidimensional nature of crime in terms of the relationshipbetween:

  • offender
  • victim
  • social reactions

Only by understanding their interaction – how each impacts on the other – can we understand crime as both a

  • private problem, in terms of its effects on victims
  • public issue, in terms of how it impacts on the quality of community life

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Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 5. Marxism

A broad overview of a range of different Marxist interpretations of crime and deviance in words and pictures Or, if you want to be picky, film.

Marxist (or critical) theories of crime assume that no behaviour is inherently deviant. Behaviour only becomes criminalised through the creation and application of laws – and in capitalist societies to understand how and why criminal forms of deviance occur we must understand the economic relationships that give rise to class-based laws. As Croall (2001) argues, for Marxists ‘the criminal law and its enforcement reflect the interests of the powerful and are a means of controlling the activities of powerless lower-class offenders’.

Rule of law

Milliband (1973), for example, suggests that laws favouring the general interests of a ruling class are an extension of its political and ideological dominance – an instrumental form of Marxism that sees the law as a tool used to control the working classes. Poulantzas (1975), however, argues that while contemporary capitalist societies need laws that benefit the interests of the ruling class, these laws have (lesser) benefits for subject classes. This form of hegemonic Marxism sees a ruling class as able to head-off class conflicts by co-opting subject classes into the ‘benefits’ of capitalism and the ‘rule of law’ (as opposed to the reality – the rule of capital).

For Marxists, laws are framed to protect both social order and property relationships:

  • Social order relates to the legality of killing people, violent behaviour and the like. Everyone benefits from being able to go about their daily lives unmolested, but a ruling class gains additional benefits; an orderly society is one where those making the greatest profits gets to keep their wealth safe and sound.
  • Property/contract laws relate to the requirements of capitalism as an economic system; they exist to enshrine in law certain rights, such as private property ownership. While everyone benefits from a law against theft, those with the most to lose reap the greatest benefit.

For Marxists, crime is part of a structural process that sees the working classes as both more criminal and more criminalised. The working class experiences greater social pressures (higher levels of economic deprivation coupled with constant ideological injunctions to consume) that lead to higher levels of crime, while their behaviour is more closely defined, surveilled and policed as criminal. While these related processes go some way towards explaining crime, they do not excuse it.

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Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 4. Feminism

A short overview of Feminist perspectives on crime and deviance combining a bit of text with quite a lot of video.

Feminist approaches are many and varied, but all, to varying extents, focus on women as both offenders and victims — partly as a response to what Sharp (2006) suggests has been the male bias of traditional criminological research and partly because ‘the study of crime became equated with the study of male criminality’.

Feminist criminology attempts to redress this ‘malestream bias’ in two ways:

  • by confronting the conventional wisdom of greater male involvement in crime — what Maguire (2002) argues is a ‘universal feature…of all modern countries’
  • by exploring the reasons for female criminality. In this respect, knowledge of female offending is largely based around two main sources, official crime statistics and offender surveys, and we can use these as a way of exploring feminist criminology and explanations for female offending.

Statistical accuracy

Official crime statistics consistently show that men, in terms of raw numbers, have greater involvement in crime than women. Self and Zealey (2007), however, make the important point that males and females commit similar typesof crime. Theft, drug offences and personal violence are the main offences for both sexes.

From a feminist standpoint these observations are interesting, mainly because most explanations for crime have focused on explaining male criminality by using women as a form of control group. Where women are considered more likely to conform to social norms, the criminological focus is switched to the search for the attributes – biological, psychological and sociological – not shared by women and which supposedly explain male criminality.

An example here is the notion of males and females having different attitudes to risk-taking, which, in turn, explains greater or lesser involvement in crime. In basic terms, risk-taking is bound up with cultural ideas about masculinity, while conformity is held to be a cultural feature of femininity.

McIvor (1998), for example, argues that greater male involvement in youth crime is ‘linked to a range of other risk-taking behaviours which in turn are associated with the search for [masculine] identity in the transition from adolescence to adulthood’. Lyng’s (1990, 2004) concept of edgework also argues that many young males are attracted to crime precisely because of the risks involved; risk-taking affirms their masculinity.

There are two objections to this argument:

  • women are defined negatively in such theories, ‘by the absence’ of something men have (a need to take risks) rather than as individuals in their own right
  • there is an ecological fallacy: while many women are not involved in crime the same is true for men – yet significant numbers of each do offend.
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Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 3. Interactionism

A quick’n’dirty overview of the Interactionist perspective on crime and deviance.

Two ideas closely associated with Interactionist approaches are those of deviance as both relative and socially constructed.

Relativity refers to the idea that the same behaviour can be considered deviant in one context (or society) but non-deviant in another. A simple example here might be punching someone in the face. If you do this in the street you could be arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned. If you do it in a boxing ring people might cheer…

This suggests, as Durkheim argued, that “if societies make the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance” then deviance is socially constructed – and this is important, as Becker (1963) argues, because it means deviance is not a quality of what someone does but rather a qualityof how others react to what they do.

And if this argument is valid it means that looking for “solutions to the problem of crime” in the behaviour or demeanour of ‘criminals’ is pointless because ‘criminals’ are only different from ‘non criminals’ when they are publicly labelled as such.

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Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 2. New Right

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a general political perception that the ‘fight against crime’ was not only being lost, but that attempts to explain and solve offending behaviours were largely ineffective. The best that could be done was to develop ways that limited the impact of crime on communities and this led to a range of policies aimed at preventing crime, developed under the umbrella of New Right approaches to reflect a more conservative approach to dealing with crime. These approaches involved crime-reduction polices that drew on ecologicalideas about people’s relationship to their immediate environment – specifically in terms of their impact on encouraging or discouraging deviant behaviour.

Crime prevention

Indicative of this general perspective, Clarke (1980) argues that crime theory should focus on a realistic approach to crime prevention and management, rather than search for the ‘causes of crime’. He argues that criminal behaviour takes many forms – property theft, for example, is very different from rape – and it makes little sense to assume they have similar causes or outcomes. However, the majority of crimes had two important characteristics that made them amenable to prevention: first, the majority are opportunistic, and second, crime is territorial.

  • Opportunistic crime is the outcome of what Clarke terms, ‘the immediate choices and decisions made by the offender’. In other words, most crime is unplanned and carried out ‘on the spur of the moment’; if an opportunity occurs (a purse left unattended, for example) an offender may be tempted if the chances of being detected are less than the likely benefits. This reflects what Right Realists call a cost / benefit analysis of crime.

Analysis of Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data for 2020 suggests that opportunistic crimes are not restricted to relatively small-scale thefts. Around 50% of all home burglaries, for example, were spur-of-the-moment decisions by the perpetrators as they responded to favourable opportunities to commit a crime that hadn’t necessarily planned or prepared to commit.

  • Territorial crime is, Wiles and Costello (2000) argue, generally local to the offender. Their research showed the ‘average distance travelled to commit domestic burglary was 1.8 miles’, which confirmed Forrester et al’s (1988) research into patterns of burglary in Rochdale.

While this “average” does, of course, hide wide individual behaviour discrepancies – some burglars, for example, target properties well outside this average – recent CSEW (2020) data has shown that around 50% of burglars knew their victims.

Territorialism is important for crime prevention and control since offences committed outside the offender’s local area are mainly related, as Wiles and Costello argue, to opportunities presenting themselves ‘during normal routines’, rather than being consciously planned (a ‘routine activity theory’ of crime). If measures are taken to reduce opportunities for crime in a particular area, crime rates will fall. The denial of opportunity, allied to territoriality, means the majority of crimes will not be displacedto other areas (although there are exceptions – activities like drug smuggling and prostitution, for example, are sensitive to displacement).

These ideas led to a range of crime prevention strategies, designed to make crime more difficult, less attractive and more costly for the potential offender, based around changes to the cultural and physical environments.

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Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 1. Functionalism

A short set of Notes covering a range of Functionalist explanations for crime and deviance, largely based around the concepts of anomie (both the Durkheimian and Mertonian interpretations) and Strain (Merton again plus Agnew’s General Strain Theory). There’s also a little bit of subcultural stuff thrown-in for good measure.

Traditional Functionalism

Functionalist approaches are based around an understanding of how societies solve what Durkheim (1938) called two problems of existence: how to create order and maintain social stability in a situation where millions of unique individuals, each with their own particular (self) interests, must be persuaded to behave collectively.

The simple answer involves the notion of collective sentiments – shared beliefs about society and the development of behavioural rules designed to reinforce this collective consciousness. However, the existence of behavioural rules, in the shape of formal and informal norms, presupposes that some will break the rules, because if they didn’t, rules would be unnecessary.

For Durkheim, therefore, deviance was normal, by which he meant functional (as opposed to beneficial). Deviance contributed to social stability because when people act ‘as a group or society’ against deviants it becomes a mechanism through which the collective conscience is both recognised and affirmed.

Behavioural boundaries

In complex societies, for example, the fact some people ‘break rules’ tells everyone where the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lie. The public condemnation of deviants, through media, for example, establishes and reinforces consensual boundaries. In this respect, crime promotes social integrationand social solidarity through its ‘public naming and shaming’ function. Popular alarm and outrage at criminal acts serve to draw people closer together ‘against a common enemy’.

Testing tolerance

Deviance is also a mechanism for social change because it tests the boundaries of public tolerance and morality. It is a social dynamicthat forces people to assess and reassess the nature of social statics(such as written laws). Laws criminalising homosexuality in our society, for example, have gradually been abandoned in line with changing social attitudes.

Moral values

Matza’s (1964) study of juvenile delinquency provides empirical support for Durkheim’s basic argument when he suggests young people have little commitment to deviant (or ‘subterranean’) values that threaten the moral consensus. Matza found that, when caught, people employ techniques of neutralisation in an attempt to explain or justify their deviance. They deny, for example, personal responsibility (‘I was drunk…’), injury (‘no one was hurt’) or victimisation (‘they hit me first’) and by so doing show a commitment to conventional moral values. If they did not respect those values there would be little point trying to justify their guilt.

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Archived Posts

PowerPoint: The ABC of Investigating

This spin-off from the burgeoning Sociological Detectives Universe™ is a vehicle by which you can simply and not-a-little-secretly introduce a soupcon of Study Skills into

Origins of Sociology: PowerPoint

This new PowerPoint Presentation introduces students to some (okay, 9) of Sociology’s founders, from the Big Three of Marx, Durkheim and Weber to lesser-known, but

Situational Action Theory

Most a-level teachers and students will probably be most familiar with Per-Olof Wikstrom’s work on the Peterborough Adolescent Development Study (PADS), a longitudinal study of

Dynamic Learning: Metacognition

The 7th film in our Dynamic Learning Series designed to introduce students to a range of important ideas and skills related to the science of

Dynamic Learning: Metacognition

Over 30 years of educational research has shown that metacognition – an awareness of how we think – helps students take more control over their

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