Innovation (Merton)
Definition
One of Merton's five adaptations: accepting the culturally approved goal (financial success) while rejecting legitimate means and substituting illegitimate ones. Merton identified innovation as the adaptation most directly linked to property crime.
- Field
- Criminology, strain theory
- Theorist
- Robert Merton
- One of
- Five modes of adaptation
- Linked to
- Property crime
Common questions
How does innovation differ from the other adaptations Merton described, such as rebellion?+
Innovation keeps the culturally approved goal, typically financial success, while rejecting only the legitimate means to reach it. Rebellion, by contrast, rejects both the goal and the means and tries to replace them with a new set entirely.
Why does Merton's theory connect innovation specifically to property crime?+
Someone adapting through innovation still wants the socially valued outcome of wealth or success, so theft, fraud, and similar acquisitive offences are the direct behavioural expression of pursuing that goal through illegitimate means.
Related terms
- Anomie
- A condition in which social norms weaken or become contradictory, leaving individuals without clear moral guidance. First used by Durkheim to describe...
- General Strain Theory (GST)
- Robert Agnew's 1992 reformulation of strain theory. GST identifies three sources of strain: failure to achieve positively valued goals, removal of positively...
- Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT)
- Messner and Rosenfeld's macro-level extension of Merton (1994). IAT argues that societies in which the economy dominates all other institutions produce high...
- Retreatism
- One of Merton's five adaptations: rejecting both the culturally approved goal and the legitimate means, withdrawing from the competitive social order altogether....
- Strain
- In criminological theory, the pressure or frustration produced when individuals cannot achieve goals through legitimate means, or when they experience loss or...