Cohen's Theory of Value or Delinquent Sub-culture

Albert Cohen's theory mainly deals with the problems of status adjustment of working-class boys. He holds that the young people's feelings of themselves depend largely upon how they are judged by others. The situations in which they are judged, most notably the school situation, are largely dominated by middle class values and standards, which in fact is dominant value system. These standards include such criteria as neatness, polished manners, academic intelligence, verbal fluency, high level of aspirations, and a drive for achievement. Young people of different origins and backgrounds tend to be judged by the same standards in the society, so that young people of lower classes find themselves competing for status and approval under the same set of rules. However, they are not equally well equipped for success in this status game. For this and other reasons, the lower-class children are more likely to experience failure and humiliation. One way they can deal with this problem is to repudiates and withdraw from the game and refuse to recognize that these rules have any application to them. But this is not quite simple because the dominant value system is also, to a degree, their value system. In brief this theory holds maintains that the working-class boy faces a problem of adjustment which is qualitatively different from the middle-class status system. Nevertheless, he is thrust into his competitive system where achievement is judged by middle-class standards of behavior and performance. Ill-prepared and poorly motivated, he is frustrated in his status aspirations by the agents of middle-class society. The delinquent sub-culture represent a ‘solution' to the working-class boy's problem, for it enables him to ‘break clean' with the middle-class morality legitimizes hostility and aggression without moral inhibitions. Thus, the delinquent sub-culture is characterized by non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic values as an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Cohen's theory has been critically examined both as theory of the delinquent sub-culture and theory of delinquency. The main criticism is that if this theory is accepted, the delinquency rate of lower-class goys should be higher in areas where they are in direct competition with middle-class boys and their rate should be lowest in areas where lower- class is universal. In addition this theory is ambiguous concerning the relation between the emergence of the sub-culture and its maintenance.