ABSTRACT
Building on Ruth Rosner Kornhauser's concession that there may be some variation in motivation among individuals, this chapter argues that the claim for incompatibility between control theory and motivational theory is mistaken. It does not challenge the positive claims that control theorists make about the existence of inhibitors that discourage people from committing crimes. The chapter begins with an argument about the variability and distribution of human motivation, and follows it with a consideration of the relationship between motivation and crime. Learning theories of crime have come in for especially sharp attack by control theorists. Theorizing about the role of learning in crime causation usually focuses on the acquisition of techniques or pro-criminal values, attitudes, and "definitions" of crime as acceptable or unacceptable, but there are other dimensions to learning that are relevant to an assessment of the contributions that learning theory can make to criminological theory.
