Social disorganisation theory

In criminology, the Social Disorganisation Theory was one of the most important theories developed by the Chicago School, related to ecological theories.

William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki
Thomas and Znaniecki (1918-1920) introduced the idea that a person's thinking processes and attitudes are constructed by the interaction between that person's situation and his or her behaviour. Attitudes are not innate but stem from a process of acculturation. Any proposed action will have social importance to an individual both because it relates to the objective situation within which the subject has to act, and because it has been shaped by attitudes formed through a lifetime of social and cultural experiences. This is based on the "four wishes" of the Thomas theorem, viz., "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences". These four wishes are the desire for new experiences, the desire for recognition, the desire for domination, and the desire for security. Combined with the cultural values of a pre-existing situation, the four wishes give rise to certain attitudes which are subjectively defined meanings and shared experience, strongly emphasised and embodied in specific institutions. The root of new attitudes arises from the formation of new relationships and interaction between the person and the world outside the community. For example, the emergence of economics as an independent sphere reflected the tendency to reduce quality to a quantity in barter transactions and led to the development of money.

Robert Ezra Park(1864-1944) and Ernest W. Burgess(1886-1966)
Park and Burgess (1925) developed a theory of urban ecology which proposed that cities are environments like those found in nature, governed by many of the same forces of Darwinian evolution, i.e. competition, that affects natural ecosystems. When a city is formed and grows, people and their activities cluster in a particular area, i.e. the process of "concentration". Gradually, this central area becomes highly populated, so there is a scattering of people and their activities away from the central city to establish the suburbs, i.e. "dispersion". They suggested that, over time, the competition for land and other scarce urban resources leads to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches, "natural areas" or zones in which people share similar social characteristics because they are subject to the same ecological pressures. As a zone becomes more prosperous and "desirable", property values and rents rise, and people and businesses migrate into that zone, usually moving outward from the city centre in a process Park and Burgess called "succession" (a term borrowed from plant ecology) and new residents take their place. At both a micro and macro level, society was thought to operate as a superorganism, where change is a natural aspect of the process of growth and neither chaotic nor disorderly. Thus, an organised area is invaded by new elements. This gives rise to local competition and there will either be succession or an accommodation which results in a reorganisation. But, during the early stages of competition, there will always be some level of disorganisation because there will be disruption to, or a breakdown in, the normative structure of the community which may or may not lead to deviant behaviour. Thus, although a city was a physical organisation, it also had also social and moral structures that could be disorganised.

Their model, known as Concentric Zone Theory and first published in The City (1925) predicted that, once fully grown, cities would take the form of five concentric rings with areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated near the city centre and more prosperous areas located near the city's edge. This theory seeks to explain the existence of social problems such as unemployment and crime in specific Chicago districts, making extensive use of synchronic mapping to reveal the spatial distribution of social problems and to permit comparison between areas. In the post-war period, the cartographic approach was criticised as simplistic in that it neglected the social and cultural dimensions of urban life, the political and economic impact of industrialisation on urban geography, and the issues of class, race, gender, and ethnicity.

Edwin Sutherland
Sutherland adopted the concept of social disorganisation to explain the increases in crime that accompanied the transformation of preliterate and peasant societies where "influences surrounding a person were steady, uniform, harmonious and consistent" to modern Western civilisation which he believed was characterised by inconsistency, conflict and un-organization (1934: 64). He also believed that the mobility, economic competition and an individualistic ideology that accompanied capitalist and industrial development had been responsible for the disintegration of the large family and homogenous neighbourhoods as agents of social control. The failure of extended kin groups expanded the realm of relationships no longer controlled by the community and undermined governmental controls leading to persistent "systematic" crime and delinquency. He also believed that such disorganisation causes and reinforces the cultural traditions and cultural conflicts that support antisocial activity. The systematic quality of the behaviour was a reference to repetitive, patterned or organised offending as opposed to random events. He depicted the law-abiding culture as dominant and more extensive than alternative criminogenic cultural views and capable of overcoming systematic crime if organised for that purpose (1939: 8). But because society is organised around individual and small group interests, society permits crime to persist. Sutherland concluded that "if the society is organised with reference to the values expressed in the law, the crime is eliminated; if it is not organised, crime persists and develops (1939:8). In later works, he switched from the concept of social disorganisation to differential social organisation to convey the complexity of overlapping and conflicting levels of organisation in a society.

Ruth Shonle Cavan
Despite producing Suicide (1928) as a study of personal disorganisation in which she confirmed that the mortality rate is relatively stable regardless of economic and social conditions, Cavan was excluded from faculty status at Chicago, served on various research committees for six years and then moved to Rockford College in Illinois. She was particularly interested in dance halls, brothels, insanity, divorce, nonvoting, suicide, and other forms of socially problematic behaviour of interest to the political reformers, studying the working lives of "business" girls and their dispersal throughout the zones of Chicago (1929). Partly as a result of her studies, Cavan (1953) emphasised the importance to the efficient functioning of the entire social order of the regulation of sex. While there are variations in the specific arrangements, all societies contain family groups, forbid incest, sanction marriage, approve more highly of legitimate than of illegitimate births, and look upon marriage as the most highly approved outlet for sexual expression of adults. She has continued the work to review delinquency in different countries (1968), returning to write of the Chicago School itself in 1983.

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay
Mapping can show spatial distributions of delinquency and crime, but it cannot explain the results. Indeed, such research has often been used politically to attribute immorality to specific population groups or ethnicities. Social Disorganisation Theory and Cultural Transmission Theory examine the consequences when a community is unable to conform to common values and to solve the problems of its residents. Shaw and McKay (1942) applied Sutherland's theory of systematic criminal behaviour, and claimed that delinquency was not caused at the individual level, but is a normal response by normal individuals to abnormal social conditions. Thus, if a community is not self-policing and imperfectly policed by outside agencies, some individuals will exercise unrestricted freedom to express their dispositions and desires, often resulting in delinquent behaviour. They considered the Concentric Zone Theory and produced a diachronic analysis to demonstrate that delinquency was already dispersed in urban areas, and that more wealthy and important groups moved to avoid the existing social disorganisation. Their concepts, hypothesis, and research methods have been a strong influence on the analysis of delinquency and crime. Their dependent variables in the delinquency rates were measured by arrests, court appearances, and court adjudications of institutional commitment. Their independent variables were economic conditions by square-mile areas, ethnic heterogeneity, and population turnover. These variables were based on where delinquents lived and consisted of 10 to 16 year-old males who were petitioned to juvenile court (56,000 juvenile court records were used as data from 1900-1933). The time frames they selected showed strong patterns of immigrant migration, believing that they could demonstrate whether delinquency was caused by particular immigrant groups or by the environment in which the immigrants lived, i.e.: Shaw and McKay demonstrated that social disorganisation was endemic to the urban areas which were the only places the newly arriving poor could afford to live. In these areas, there was a high rate of turnover in the population (residential instability) and mixes of people from different cultural backgrounds (ethnic diversity). Shaw and McKay's analyses relating delinquency rates to these structural characteristics established key facts about the community correlates of crime and delinquency: Comparing the maps, Shaw and McKay recognised that the pattern of delinquency rates corresponded to the "natural urban areas" of Park and Burgess’ Concentric Zone Model. This evidenced the conclusion that delinquency rates always remained high for a certain region of the city (ecological zone 2), no matter which immigrant group lived there. Hence, delinquency was not "constitutional", but was to be correlated with the particular ecological environment in which it occurs. In this context, Shaw and McKay asserted that ethnic diversity interferes with communication among adults, with effective communication less likely in the face of ethnic diversity because differences in customs and a lack of shared experiences may breed fear and mistrust.
 * if high delinquency rates for particular immigrant groups remained high during their migration through the city’s different ecological environments, then delinquency could be associated with their distinctive constitutional or cultural features;
 * if delinquency rates decreased as immigrants moved through different ecological environments, then delinquency could not be associated with the particular constitution of the immigrants, but must somehow be connected with their environment.
 * The rates of juvenile delinquency were consistent with an ordered spatial pattern with the highest rates in the inner-city areas and declining with distance from the city centre.
 * There was an identical spatial pattern revealed by various other indexes of social problems.
 * The spatial pattern of delinquency rates showed significant long-term stability even though the nationality structure of the population in the inner-city areas changed greatly throughout the decades.
 * Within inner-city areas the course of becoming delinquent occurred through a network of interpersonal relationships involving family, gangs, and the neighbourhood.

There are a number of problems in Shaw and McKay's work. As defined, social disorganisation downplays the significance of ethnic and cultural factors in delinquency. Some ethnicities may encourage criminal activity because the behaviour is not considered criminal or wrong. Although research in different countries has tended to support their findings that delinquent rates are highest in areas with economic decline and instability, that research has not found that crime rates spatially disperse from the city centre outward. In fact, in some countries, the wealthy live in the centre, while the poorest zones are near its fringes. Further, their work does not consider why there is significant non-delinquency in delinquency areas. Thus, the theory identifies social causes of delinquency that seem to be located in specific geographical areas, and its conclusions are not completely generalisable. For a general discussion of their work, see Snodgrass (1976).

Robert E. Lee Faris
Faris (1955) extended the concept of social disorganisation to explain social pathologies and social problems in general, including crime, suicide, mental illness, and mob violence. Defining organisation as definite and enduring patterns of complementary relations (1955: 3), he defined social disorganisation as the weakening or destruction of the relationships which hold together a social organisation (1955: 81). Such a concept was to be employed objectively as a measurable state of a social system, independent of personal approval or disapproval. When applied to crime, Faris' central proposition was that, "A crime rate is ...a reflection of the degree of disorganisation of the control mechanisms in a society." In turn, crime also contributes to disorganisation, and disorganisation of such conventional mechanisms is especially likely in large, rapidly growing industrial cities where such disorganisation permits highly organised criminality as well as less organised forms of group and individual crime and delinquency.

Robert J. Sampson
Sampson (1993) claims that any theory of crime must begin with the fact that most violent criminals belonged to teenage peer-groups, particularly street gangs, and that a gang member will become a full-time criminal if social controls are insufficient to address delinquent behaviour at an early age. He follows Shaw and McKay (1969) in accepting that if the family and relatives offer inadequate supervision or incomplete socialisation, children from broken families are more likely to join violent gangs unless others take the parents' place. But, even children from unstable families are less likely to be influenced by peer groups in a community where most family units are intact. Tight-knit communities are more likely to identify strangers, report deviants to their parents, and pass warnings along. High rates of residential mobility and high-rise housing disrupt the ability to establish and maintain social ties. Formal organisations like schools, church, and the police act as surrogates for family and friends in many communities, but poor, unstable communities often lack the organisation and political connections to obtain resources for fighting crime and offering young people an alternative to deviant behaviour. Sampson concludes that "the empirical data suggest that the structural elements of social disorganisation have relevance for explaining macro level variations in violence." Social disorganisation may also produce crime by isolating communities from the mainstream culture. Sampson and Wilson (1995) proposed a theory of race and urban inequality to explain the disproportionate representation of African Americans as victims and offenders in violent crime. The basic idea proposed was that community-level patterns of racial inequality give rise to the social isolation and ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organisation and ultimately the control of crime. Sampson and Wilson (1995) pursued this logic to argue that the community-level causes of violence are the same for both whites and blacks, but that racial segregation by community differentially exposes members of minority groups to key violence-inducing and violence-protecting social mechanisms, thereby explaining black-white disparities in violence. Their thesis has come to be known as "racial invariance" in the fundamental causes of crime. More generally, see Sampson and Bean (2006).