- Boundary maintenance – reinforcing norms and values for the majority; adaptation – facilitating social change; safety-valve, warning of a societal malfunction.
- The feeling created when individuals find their access to legitimate means of achieving status is blocked+-.
- Ritualists have lost sight of society’s goals, but still follow the legitimate means or rules; retreatists have rejected both society’s goals and the legitimate means to achieve them.
- It assumes that all those who experience a strain to anomie will deviate, but many who experience strain do not deviate.
- Crime that has no economic motive, such as vandalism.
- Because some people are not effectively socialised and because in complex societies there are subcultural differences in norms and values.
- Goals are the things we are expected to want and strive for, such as success, money, fast cars; means are the ways in which a person may obtain or achieve these goals.
- Because not everyone who fails in mainstream society has equal access to an illegitimate opportunity structure; e.g. some areas have an organised professional criminal structure but others do not.
- The emphasis on money and economic success; the lack of a supportive welfare system; the lack of clear norms about how wealth should be pursued legitimately.
