ABSTRACT
A global assessment of Social Sources of Delinquency (SSD)'s impact on contemporary neighborhood criminology must be decidedly mixed. Mark Stafford's review of SSD highlighted "Ruth Rosner Kornhauser's call to revive work on structural (e.g., ecological and situational) explanations of delinquency," observing that "for the last decade or so, both theory and research on delinquency have been inordinately individualistic." Kornhauser argued that Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay actually had offered "a distinct control model capable of standing alone according to the internal logic of their own theory". Kornhauser reformulation of the Shaw and McKay structural model is fairly straightforward. A blistering critique of cultural deviance theories unfolds between those pages and it quickly becomes apparent that the "cultural transmission" component of the Shaw and McKay model is not going to fare well in Kornhauser's hands. Unquestionably, the presentation of the cultural transmission thesis by Shaw and McKay was theoretically muddled and logically inconsistent.
