ABSTRACT
When Ruth Kornhauser set out to write her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, she had as a template a three-part paper she had presented to a seminar attended by prominent scholars in the Berkeley area. In 1963, Kornhauser had not settled on a single label for the second set of theories, which were then called by a variety of names, including cultural transmission, subcultural, culture conflict, and differential association. All assumed that "groups with high rates of deviance have conventional values that are deviant only according to the standards of some other cultural system." By 1975, Kornhauser had decided that her 1963 paper was inconsistent with established fact, that pursuing its major positive thesis would produce a "totally wrong-headed book." She had believed, and had invested heavily in the strain theory enterprise. It seemed to have everything: motive, logic, condemnation, exculpation, and a clearly falsifiable central hypothesis.
