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, framework, and content of a morally ordered society. Durkheim gives the name anomie (anomy) to the pathology of experienced social structure, or as he puts it the unregulated "relations of the organs [of the social body]" (Durkheim 368). Durkheim continues:
[A]s the collective conscience becomes weak, the anxieties which are thus produced can no longer be as completely neutralized. Common sentiments no longer have the same force to keep the individual atta...