Merton Social Structure and Anomie Term Paper

Total Length: 1683 words ( 6 double-spaced pages)

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Thus creative accounting becomes a way to justify the means -- because showing a profit will generate more profit, and gain the firm social esteem and more investors, being unethical in the supposedly 'short run' seems acceptable in the eyes of the firm's employees. People go along with it because it is accepted in the culture of the firm.

All of these are examples of how the social structure of a society, in this case, American society, sets certain norms, such as the norm of success. It creates institutional norms, like the ideal that capitalist firms that must quickly show a profit. Advertisements convey the message that expensive material possessions are equated with success. Subcultures within the greater social structure endorse aberrant behavior, however, and the wider the gulf between the common cultural aspirations and available methods of achieving these aspirations, the more likely aberrant, nonconformist behavior will arise.

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In the case of upwardly mobile college students, a subculture of drinking may encourage some students to engage in aberrant behavior but they are unlikely to make deviance a permanent part of their character, if they know that they fail to graduate they will not be able to meet their culture's aspirations of success, and they know that doing well in school and being recruited to a top Wall Street firm is a conceivable possibility, and others have done so before them. This is not the case, however, with individuals living in the inner city who feel estranged from all venues of mobility.

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"Merton Social Structure And Anomie" (2007, October 18) Retrieved July 1, 2025, from
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"Merton Social Structure And Anomie", 18 October 2007, Accessed.1 July. 2025,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/merton-social-structure-anomie-35057