Michael Milken and Robert K. Merton

This research will examine Michael Milken's white-collar crimes and corporate deviance in terms of sociologist Robert K. Merton's theory of deviance. The research will set forth the context in which Milken's behavior patterns lend themselves to analysis from Merton's perspective and then discuss how shifts in Milken's behavior since the exposure of his white-collar crime can be explained by Merton's views.

Merton's conception of deviance is structured around the relationship between individual wants and needs on one hand and the ability to fulfill those wants, needs, and dreams on the other. According to Merton (25ff), the venue for fulfillment is society, and its class structure, institutions, cultural norms, and the position of the individual within the whole may facilitate, prevent, or retard fulfillment. Man, says Merton (195), "is to a very important degree controlled by his social relations to the instruments of production." Written and unwritten rules of engagement between individuals and between individuals and social institutions dominate life experience, such that social life amounts to life in a bureaucracy, with behavior assuming the character of ritual adherence to specific kinds of action.

Merton is considered a functionalist sociologist (Swingewood 230f); his work proceeds from the social theory of Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sought to apply the scientific method to examining the form, function, and substance of society, in order to explain the source, evolution,

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ey was not Milken's greatest objective; what was of highest importance to him was social and personal power. Magnet compares Milken to Ivan Boesky, an investor convicted of insider trading at about the same time Milken was being investigated, noting Boesky's reputation for old-fashioned greed. Milken's motivation was different: Milken chased a larger vision. Driven by an appetite more for power than for cash, he sought to bend the world to his will. And, like some Napoleon of finance, the intense man with the odd toupee not only succeeded in changing the world, but--however unscrupulous and criminal the SEC might prove his methods to be--changed it in some ways for the better (Magnet 63). Creating money by way of junk bonds was an innovation that, on its face, was not necessarily illegal but that in Milken's hands appears to have fallen afoul of securities laws. Thus Milken's ability to use a high-risk financial instrument to his material benefit in a way that other investment bankers had not is consistent with Merton's view that innovators have their eye on the social prize but may use unorthodox methods to obtain it. Magnet suggests, without using Merton's terminology, that there may have been a certain amount of anomie at work

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