ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether Ruth Rosner Kornhauser's hypothetical work post-Social Sources would have disavowed opportunity theories or seen them as a logical extension of the ideas she championed regarding macro-level informal social control. It reviews Kornhauser's re-conceptualization of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay's social disorganization theory, including a discussion of the omission of opportunity from her work. The chapter also reviews contemporary situational opportunity theories and, in the process, illustrates how they integrate ideas from the systemic model of social disorganization prompted by Kornhauser. It concludes with speculation regarding how Kornhauser would likely have appraised crime opportunity theories. Kornhauser's Social Sources of Delinquency provided an appraisal of the four major models of criminological/delinquency theory that prevailed at the time of her writing: strain theories, control theories, cultural deviance theories, and mixed models of delinquent subcultures. The criminal gangs most specifically provided illegitimate means of success and thus "criminal opportunity.".
