Robert Merton's Strain Theory Analysis

Almost everybody wants to be successful and get ahead in life. Cultural goals are the objectives that are legitimate and desirable for members of society to achieve. Cultural goals can be things like being successful or gaining wealth and prestige. An institutionalized means are approved ways of achieving one’s goals. But not everyone can get the institutionalized means to achieve their goals. So, what happens when people can’t get the means to achieve their goals? The result is Robert Merton’s Strain Theory. The Strain Theory is Robert Merton’s term for what happens when a society influences large numbers of people to desire a cultural goal (Such as success, wealth, and prestige), but withholds from some people the approved means of reaching …show more content…
This is where people take the socially accepted path to achieve their goals. They pursue their cultural goals through the approved means. These are the people who go to school and get their education to get good paying jobs and be successful. If they can’t find a well-paying job they will take a less desirable one to continue to meet their goal, if they can't get into a top Ivy League school they will go to a lower ranked average school. They do not give up on the goal or deviate and achieve their goals through unapproved means. On the other hand, we have the Innovation mode of adaptation. In this mode, people accept the goals of society but use illegitimate means to try to reach them. They try to achieve their socially acceptable cultural goals through unapproved and socially unacceptable means. This is where crime starts to happen. For example, a person may want the cultural goal of being wealthy but doesn’t want to get the wealth through conventional mean like working a job so this person ends of robbing a bank, or stealing from other people or selling …show more content…
But even though they have given up on their goals they cling to conventional and traditional rules of conduct. Theses people reject the cultural goal but still accept the institutionalized means. An example of a Ritualist is someone who has given up on getting ahead at work, becoming CEO, getting promotions or being someone great and they just survive by following the rules of the job and getting paid. A more specific example of this would be my fourth-grade teacher when she first came to teach us she was very enthusiastic, everyone could tell that she loved doing her job she put real effort into teaching us and helping us understand. Then she gave up and lost passion she didn’t want to teach anymore and didn’t put in the effort, she remained our teacher and stayed at our school because it was her job and she got paid for it but she no longer put any effort into her goal. Sometimes people cling to jobs even when they have abandoned the goal of it.
Another mode of adaptation Retreatism, this is where people reject both the cultural goals and the means of achieving them. Some people stop trying to be successful and instead they just become alcoholics and retreat “down the necks of the bottle” or they may become drug addicts who retreat from the world through their drugs that they use. Oddly enough, men who go to monasteries