SOC 201 Chapter 11: Chapter 11.15
Document Summary
If you are poor and illiterate, you probably will not have much of a future as a computer hacker or bank embezzler. If you are poor and want to steal, you are pretty much limited to taking on a single victim (or possibly two or three) at a time. But as an executive officer in a savings and loan, you have the unusual opportunity of swindling hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Learning to be deviant: howard becker"s study of marijuana use. Merton"s conception of structural strain gives us some insight into why people might act in deviant ways, but it really does not tell us how people actually become deviant. Sociologists have noticed that one generally learns to be deviant through a kind of socialization just as one learns to conform through socialization. In other words, deviance is frequently a learned social behavior. One sociologist who made this point was howard becker.
