Freda Adler - The Legacy of Anomie Theory

Edited by
Freda Adler & William S. Laufer
with an introduction by

Robert K. Merton

ADVANCES IN CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY

Volume 6

First published 1995 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2019 by Routledge

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Copyright 1995 by Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0662-8 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-53655-5 (hbk)

ISSN: 0894-2366

Robert K. Merton

Thomas J. Bernard

Nikos Passas

Robert Agnew

Gary F. Jensen

Richard Rosenfeld and Steven F. Messner

Deborah Vidaver Cohen

Elin Waring, David Weisburd, and Ellen Chayet

Ko-lin Chin and Jeffrey Fagan

John P. Hoffmann and Timothy Ireland

Freda Adler

Sir Leon Radzinowicz

David F. Greenberg

S. George Vincentnathan

Bonnie Berry

Michael J. Lynch and W. Byron Groves

C. Ray Jeffery

Gilbert Geis

The contributions to the first five volumes of Advances in Criminological Theory have generated lively discussion and comment. These comments themselves are contributing to the advance of criminological theory. There are two comments in this volume. The editors invite others to contribute their reflections on issues raised by the contributions to this series. Comments need not be in article form. Brief notes are equally welcome.

for James S. Coleman my onetime student, longtime colleague, enduring friend and teacher

Writing in her capacity as editor of Advances in Criminological Theory, Freda Adler reminds me that Social Structure and Anomie (SS&A) appeared more than half a century ago. And, she went on to say, Volume 6 of Advances would consist largely of papers focused on the tradition of sociological and criminological thought to which it and my further elucidating papers on SS&A have given rise. Hence, the invitation to have me do an introduction. She made it clear from the start that this would not call for a dialogue with what I soon found to be a wide array of pointed critical commentaries and nicely constructive extensions of that theoretical tradition in this volume. Instead, it would call for reflections on the paradigm of SS&A as it evolved over its early decades. That obliged me to warn that such an assignment will exact a considerable price from the reader, for suitable documentation of even the early phases of that still ongoing theoretical development would entail a relentless series of references to my own work and a good number of quotations from it and from commentaries on it; worse still, a detailed biography of the paradigm would surely include a good many footnoted asides as well.

At that point, coincidence took over. For it happens that I have long been intermittently at work on a paper with the provisional title Opportunity Structures: A Brief Biography of the Concept1a paper that, as the years move on, promises (or threatens) to develop into a rather more differentiated monograph with the current working title, Opportunity Structure: On the Emergence, Diffusion, and Differentiation of a Social Science Concept, 1930s- 1990s. That comparatively extensive work is a specimen case study of a developing concept examined from the theoretical framework of the historical sociology of scientific knowledge. The present, mercifully shorter conceptual reprise, in the form of a retrospective confined to its first three decades, draws heavily on that work-in-exceedingly-slow-progress and on previously unpublished correspondence as well as on earlier publications in print and on oral publications in the form of lectures, seminars, workshops and kindred arrangements.2

The inclusion of oral publications, which in the nature of the form are often ephemeral, is in this instance essential, since the successive publications of the evolving paradigm of SS&A in print were invariably preceded by extensive discussions in lectures and seminars. As I have observed elsewhere in some detail, such direct interaction among teachers, students, and colleagues makes for cognitive micro-environments in which new ideas emerge and develop.3 And, as we shall see in the case of SS&A, it also leads to primary diffusion and development of those ideas in the local micro-environments as distinct from their secondary diffusion and manifold elucidation in the cognitive macro-environment that occur after publication in print. (I resist the temptation to advance conjectures about the patterns of intellectual diffusion that follow from the rapidly increasing use of E-mail and electronic publication.)4