Functionalism

Question 1

Parsons

Answer 1

• youth culture is a way to bridge young people from childhood to adulthood.

Question 2

Parsons Overview

Answer 2

• in trad. societies people were seen to enter adulthood at a much younger age. Their transition to adulthood would usually be marked by a ceremony
• By contrast, in modern societies y.c has replaced these ceremonies that marked a persons’ ‘coming of age’.

Question 3

Why did Parsons believe that youth culture is a prolonged ‘rite of passage’

Answer 3

• adult roles were so much more complex in modern societies that young people needed longer to learn and prepare.

Question 4

What happens during youth culture that helps young people prepare? (Parsons)

Answer 4

• many young people may enter the employment market and take on part time work to socialise them, in part, into the world of work we expect adults to do.
• society young people gradually become more independent in school, take more responsibility for their own work. This reflects the personal responsibility we expect adults to deal with.

Question 5

Roles of children (Parsons)

Answer 5

• Play
• Obey
• Learn to read, write etc.

Question 6

Roles of adults (Parsons)

Answer 6

• Being financially responsible
• Be emotionally mature
• Live independently

Question 7

Parsons Evaluation

Answer 7

• does not apply to all young people. EG young NEETS (not in employment, education or training). They have not made the transition into adult roles. Having qualifications and a career are a key part of being an adult in modern societies.

Question 8

Eisenstadt

Answer 8

• Function of youth culture is to socially integrate young people into society.
• Provides young people with a set of values, norms and consequently a sense of belonging to a common cause or outlook.

Question 9

Eisenstadt Overview

Answer 9

• In modern industrial societies youth culture contributes to social order as it helps young people express their frustrations without threatening social order.
• young people to cope with stress and move from the ascribed position of a child to the achieved position of being an adult in your own right.

Question 10

Eisenstadt Evaluation

Answer 10

• Functionalists are accused of over-generalising about young people. Eisenstadt ignores that some young people face issues far greater than the stress over exams he describes.
• Functionalists fail to consider the impact of social class, gender or ethnicity on youth subcultures.
• Functionalists fail to consider that some youth subcultures may be harmful or dysfunctional to both society and the individuals who comprise them.

Question 11

Albert Cohen

Answer 11

• Theory of Subcultural Strain

Question 12

Albert Cohen Overview

Answer 12

• working class boys cannot achieve status through material wealth or education, but deviance allows them to achieve status through delinquent subcultures.

Question 13

Albert Cohen Evaluation

Answer 13

• Offers explanation for youth deviance, youth and social class, gender etc.
• Like Merton, assumes that working-class boys start off sharing middle-class success goals, only to reject these when they fail. Ignores the possibility that they didn’t share these goals in the first place and so never saw themselves as failures.

Question 14

Cloward and Ohlin

Answer 14

• Functionalist Subcultural Theorist

- Three subcultures

Question 15

Coward and Ohlin

Answer 15

• The key reason why different subcultures occur is not only unequal access to the legitimate opportunity structure, as Merton and Cohen recognise , but unequal access to the illegitimate opportunity structures.
• different illegitimate opportunities for young people to learn criminal skills and to develop criminal careers. They identify three types of deviant subculture that result.

Question 16

Conflict Subcultures

Answer 16

• Arise in areas of high population turnover.
• Which results in high levels of social disorganisation and prevents a stable professional criminal network developing.
• This means that the only illegitimate opportunities available are within loosely organised gangs.
• Where violence provides a release for young men’s frustration at their blocked opportunities, as well as an alternative source of status that they can earn by winning territory from rival gangs.

Question 17

Criminal Subcultures

Answer 17

• provide youths with an apprenticeship for a career in utilitarian crime.
• arise only in neighbourhoods with longstanding and stable criminal culture with an established hierarchy of professional adult crime.
• allows the young to associate with adult criminals who can select those with the right aptitudes and abilities and provide them with training and mentoring as well as the opportunities criminal career progression

Question 18

Retreatism Subcultures

Answer 18

• emerges among those lower class youth who are ‘double failures’ . The response is a retreat into drug addiction and alcoholism, paid for by petty theft, shoplifting and prostitution.

Question 19

Double failures (Cloward and Ohlin)

Answer 19

those who have failed to succeed in both mainstream society and in the crime and gang cultures mentioned

Question 20

Cloward and Ohlin Evaluation

Answer 20

• Strain theories have been influential both on later theories of crime and on government policy. Left Realism developed the ideas of criminal subcultures and in the 1960s Ohlin was appointed to help develop crime policy in the USA under President Kennedy.
• agree with Merton and Cohen that most crime is working-class, thus ignoring crimes of the wealthy. Marxists would argue their theory over-predicts the amount of working-class crime. Like Merton and Cohen, they too ignore the wider power structure, including who makes and enforces the law.