Social Disorganization Theory Essay

Essay Prompt: Post-Kornhauser, social disorganization theory was initially largely transformed into a “systemic model” of informal control, as illustrated by this week’s readings. Explain this systemic theory.
Shaw and McKay (1969) set the foundation of the social disorganization theory in their work “Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas”. The importance of economic status, ethnic heterogeneity and residential mobility to juvenile delinquency and crime in urban settings were emphasized, however, there is no clear or explicit “model” were displayed. Later on, Kornhauser (1978) evaluated Shaw and McKay’s work and proposed her version of social disorganization model based on Control Theory. She distinguished social structure from culture and put controls between social disorganization and crime & delinquency as the mediation. Together
By using 1982 and 1984 British Crime Survey data and conducting weighted least squares (WLS) regression models. Exogenous variables including low socioeconomic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, family disruption and urbanization, and intervening variables including sparse local friendship networks, unsupervised peer groups and low organizational participation were all tested to detect their direct and indirect influence of local crime rate. Among them, family disruption and urbanization were innovatively proposed to be included in the model. The results showed that inventing variables, namely sparse local friendship networks, unsupervised peer groups and low organizational participation, had extraordinary high impact on the victimization rate compared with direct influence of community structural variables. In this way, they testified the social disorganization theory and “renewed relevance for explaining macro-level variations in crime rates (Sampson and Groves, 1989,