ABSTRACT
Robert K. Merton’s theory has the reputation of being the pre-eminently sociological theory of deviant behavior. Its concern is to account for the distribution of deviant behavior among the positions in a social system and for differences in the distribution and rates of deviant behavior among systems. It tries to account for these things as functions of system propertie—i.e., the ways in which cultural goals and opportunities for realizing them within the limits of the institutional norms are distributed. To say that anomie theory suffers from the assumption of discontinuity is to imply that it treats the deviant act as though it were an abrupt change of state, a leap from a state of strain or anomie to a state of deviance. Very closely related to the foregoing point is the conception of the development of the act as a feedback, or, in more traditional language, interaction process.
