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Both E. H. Sutherland and R. K. Merton rejected theories that propose simple causal links between poverty and crime. Sutherland disproved them with his counterexample of white-collar offending and replaced them with his theory of differential association. This chapter explores the potential contributions of anomie to the understanding of white-collar crime. It examines not only the general goals and attitudes that were the focus of Merton’s attentions, but also the situational circumstances and opportunities confronted by white-collar offenders. In order to commit some types of white-collar crime —especially embezzlement, giving or receiving kickbacks or bribes, antitrust and some types of tax fraud —an individual offender needs to have access to opportunities for offending provided by the legitimate workplace. One way to develop the use of anomie in the study of white-collar crime and to integrate it into criminological theorizing is to understand whether and how it can incorporate the role that situation plays in criminal activity at the individual level.

This chapter focuses on three areas that exemplify the range and scope of both theory and practice in contemporary forensic psychology – psychology in the courtroom, advances in theories of criminal behaviour, and impact of these theories on crime prevention strategies. Many forensic psychology practitioners will appear in the courtroom. Any field of applied psychology is bound to meet its critics who dismiss its theories, its methods, its appreciation of real world issues, and the generalizability of the evidence it produces. The search for an explanation for criminal behaviour has a long history, with distinguished contributions from many disciplines including psychology. The emergence of a social learning approach to the explanation of criminal behaviour can be traced to a line of theorizing, beginning with E. H. Sutherland’s differential association theory, that emphasized the importance of learning in understanding criminal behaviour.

Age is by far the most powerful predictor of the cessation of those forms of deviant behavior that involve substantial risk and/or physically demanding behavior. Turning to the issue of gender difference in deviant behavior, one finds that no sociological theory of deviance explains why deviant behavior is primarily a male phenomenon. Labelling theory has been the most popular perspective in the area of deviance. Differential association is essentially a theory of socialization. It suggests that if persons are brought up in an environment where the dominant message is that deviant behavior is acceptable and appropriate, they will accept this view and commit deviant acts. The strong patterning of the relationship between youthful age and low points in psychological well-being, life disenchantment, anxiety, and depression provide some empirical support for applying the Durkheimian concept of anomie to the transition adolescents and young adults are undergoing.

This chapter suggests that theories of action can provide frameworks for criminologicai discourse. The explicit use of action theories as ways of integrating criminological accounts offers one such means of achieving this goal. Radical behavioral approaches have fed into criminology by way of a number of largely unrelated initiatives on the part of both sociologists and psychologists. Social learning theory and radical behaviorism have suffered from their association with differential association theory, preoccupied as it is with the social aspects of delinquent behavior in relation both to its mode of acquisition and to the motives and reinforcements it recognizes. The action theories that have been discussed are often linked to the theoretical accounts with which they have been most closely associated. Thus, the learning theory approaches have often been taken to exemplify the positivist tradition within criminology, while a line of descent for the rational choice approach has been traced from classical and neo-classical criminology.

This chapter offers thoughts on necessary future directions of theoretical studies on cybercrime generally, and differential association theory (DAT) and social learning theory (SLT) specifically. In the case of cybercrime, DAT proposes that interaction with differential associates who engage in technocrime will increase not only the actors' knowledge on how to engage in technocrime, but also aids in the acquisition of the motives and drives needed for participating in this illegal activity. SLT proposes that interaction with differential associates who engage in technocrime will cause a person to form definitions favorable or unfavorable to technocrime through an operant-conditioning-based learning process. The social learning process then repeats itself, which can either perpetuate cybercrime or abstinence from cybercrime, while also allowing for people to engage in cybercrime sporadically. Recently, scholars have discussed the roles played by associates in the causation of crime, a conversation that is especially relevant to the online world in which cybercrime occurs.

This chapter explores how biography and theoretical context intersected to foster the development of Sutherland's classic differential association perspective. A number of incidents helped me progress beyond this stage of mental disorganization, and led to the development of the theory which became known as differential association. Differential association is the causal or genetic process through which a particular person or series of persons, regarded individually, became criminals. Culture conflict is assumed in the concept of differential association. In order for association to be differential, cultures must be conflicting. Cultures are in conflict in many respects. The theory of differential association is that a person becomes a criminal through membership in a criminal group and segregated from anti-criminal groups, whose practices constitute respectively the criminal culture and the anti-criminal culture. Culture conflict and differential association are explanations from the point of view of the individual, while differential group organization is from the point of view of a group.

In the 1950s, American criminology witnessed the emergence of several new theoretical ideas about the causes of crime and delinquency. Through the 1940s, Sutherland's differential association theory was the dominant etiological idea in American sociology and criminology, and it would not be challenged until the second half of the 20th Century began. One of those challengers was Walter C. Reckless and his containment theory. Walter Reckless was born in Philadelphia in 1899 into a comfortable middle-class family where music and the arts were important components of family life. By the early 1950s, he had begun to conceptualize a control theory of delinquency which he would eventually call "containment theory". Containment theory postulated that "strong inner and reinforcing outer containment constitutes an insulation against normative deviancy, that is, violation of the sociolegal conduct norms". Containment theory, along with the early contributions of others, including Reiss, Toby, and Nye, helped lay the foundation for the development of modern social control theory.

This chapter aims to clarify and broaden key elements of differential-association/social-learning theory, using illustrative quotes from life history of "Sam Goodman"—a longtime "thief" and quasi-legitimate businessman who died in the 1990s following a four-month bout with lung cancer. Sam Goodman's life history narratives reveal crime and criminal careers not so much as discrete events or series of events, but as a process that can be marked by amplification spirals, shifts, and oscillations, and waxing and waning commitments to crime and criminal others. The behaviors of peers or associates may be as or more important than attitudes of peers in influencing an individual's own delinquency, just as one's past delinquency is likely to forecast greater risk for future delinquency. The concept of normative conflict frames the theory. Normative conflict is simply the notion that various groups and subgroups in society differ in terms of definitions of right and wrong, and in their definitions of whether individuals are obligated to follow laws.

In Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi attempts to state and test a theory of delinquency, seeing in the delinquent a person relatively free of the intimate attachments, the aspirations, and the moral beliefs that bind most people to a life within the law. In prominent alternative theories, the delinquent appears either as a frustrated striver forced into delinquency by his acceptance of the goals common to us all, or as an innocent foreigner attempting to obey the rules of a society that is not in position to make the law or define conduct as good or evil. Hirschi analyzes a large body of data on delinquency collected in Western Contra Costa County, California, contrasting throughout the assumptions of the strain, control, and cultural deviance theories. He outlines the assumptions of these theories and discusses the logical and empirical difficulties attributed to each of them. Then draws from sources an outline of social control theory, the theory that informs the subsequent analysis and which is advocated here. Often listed as a "Citation Classic," Causes of Delinquency retains its force and cogency with age. It is an important volume and a necessary addition to the libraries of sociologists, criminologists, scholars and students in the area of delinquency.

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.

This chapter reviews Ruth Rosner Kornhauser's major contributions to criminological theory and research, focusing on her typology of criminological theories. It discusses the intellectual influences that helped shape Kornhauser's approach to criminological theory, including Talcott Parson's functionalist approach and Gertrude Jaeger and Philip Selznick's normative theory of culture. The chapter revisits her construction and critique of "cultural deviance theory," and speculates about what led her to misinterpret the writings of Edwin Sutherland and other members of the Chicago School of Sociology. It reconsiders the issues of social structure and culture rose by Kornhauser and outlines a strategy for remedying her errors and moving beyond her presentation to a research agenda for criminology. Criminologists who assess Kornhauser's work rarely discuss her theoretical influences, with the exception of her alignment with social disorganization and social control perspectives. Kornhauser carefully constructs "cultural deviance theory," arguing that Sutherland's theory of differential association is its "purest" case.

This chapter reviews the empirical research evidence on the validity of social learning theory as an explanation of criminal and deviant behavior. It asserts that social learning theory can be elaborated to account for criminological and sociological regularities, making sense of events at the micro-levels of temporal and ecological aggregation, providing a better explanation than other theories. The chapter describes the volume of studies and the positive findings, with few negative findings, provides greater empirical support for social learning theory than for any other major social psychological theory of crime and deviance. Social Structure and Social Learning model is a cross-level elaboration or integration that proposes that social structure has an indirect effect on criminal and conforming behavior through the social learning variables of differential association, and imitation. Imitation and contagion in macro level analysis are treated as part of a statistical problem eliminated through statistical adjustments and filtering.

Developmental and life-course criminology (DLC) is concerned with three main issues: the development of offending and antisocial behavior, risk and protective factors at different ages, and the effects of life events on the course of development. DLC is especially concerned to document and explain within-individual changes in offending throughout life. The main aim of this volume is to advance knowledge about DLC theories, which have been developed only in the last twenty years. These recent theories aim to integrate knowledge about individual, family, peer, school, neighborhood, community, and situational influences on offending, and to integrate key elements of earlier theories such as strain, social learning, control, and differential association.

This article investigates emotional contagion in workplaces by proposing an expanded approach that simultaneously considers contagion both absorbed by (i.e., contagion absorbed) and issued toward (i.e., contagion infected) others, namely, within-individual bidirectional contagion. Furthermore, it explores the differential association of contagion to leaders, colleagues, and clients, namely, a holistic mapping. Participants (N = 694) from six organizations were asked how frequently they both absorbed and transmitted four basic emotions from or to others, and whether the emotional experience occurred with regard to their leaders, colleagues, and clients. The findings reveal that positive and negative emotions considered for within-individual bidirectional contagion were more frequently experienced with colleagues followed by clients, whereas leaders were the least associated with emotional contagion. The relevance of a holistic mapping of emotional contagion in work settings and its implications for leaders...