hello and welcome to deviance and social control i'm danielle mccartney and today we'll be talking about social disorganization theory this macro level theory does not focus on an individual's motivation for criminal or deviant behavior but the ways that our physical and social environments create conditions for crime and deviance as we all know some places some neighborhoods schools cities are more dangerous than others so location matters clifford shaw and henry d mckay's social disorganization theory argues that rather than personality or individual level characteristics it's the physical and social environment that lead to criminal and deviant behavior this theory came out of what is called the chicago school that's the department of sociology at the university of chicago particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries this chicago school played a major role in developing studies of crime and deviance studies from the chicago school demonstrated that crime and delinquency co-occur with other social problems in communities such as poverty dilapidated housing residential instability and so on the precursor to social disorganizational theory is park and burgess's cohen centric zone model also coming out of the chicago school so concentric zone model argues that cities develop in rings around the city center but that the process of development and establishing each zone causes disorganization because of the disruption to or breakdowns in the normative structure of the community as that zone is transitioning and that may or may not lead to deviant behavior so although a city was a physical organization it also had this social and moral structures that could be disorganized so in the zones identified by park and burgess areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated near the city center and then more prosperous areas are located near the city's edge so in the center this is the central business district then it's a factory zone then it's the transition zone of mixed residential and commercial uses it's called the zone of transition outside of that is the working class residential homes this was in later decades called the inner city or the zone of independent working people's homes then outside of that these are the better quality middle class homes so the zone of better housing called residential zone and on the outside is the commuter zone this is high class homes on the outskirts or outer suburbs where homeowners can afford to commute to the central business district so social disorganization theory concentrates on that zone of transition so shaw and mckay applied this concentric zone model developed by park and burgess to study juvenile delinquency and they observed that crime tends to be concentrated in particular areas of the city and importantly crime remained relatively stable within different areas despite continual changes in the populations who lived there so neighborhoods with high crime rates had persistently higher rates of crime regardless of which racial or ethnic group happened to reside there at any particular time and as these previously quote unquote crime prone groups moved to lower crime areas of the city then their rate of criminal activity decreased so in research describing the characteristics of disorganized areas areas that have high levels of adolescent delinquency high levels of criminal behavior shaw and mckay argue that disorganized areas are characterized by high levels of poverty transiency or population turnover i mean these were undesirable residential communities where people left once it became feasible for them to do so so high turnover either from immigration or housing instability weakens the attachment of people or property owners to the area and then third heterogeneity this is racial and ethnic differences different groups coming together so socioeconomically deprived areas also tend to be settled by newly arrived immigrants which resulted in the ethnic and racial heterogeneity of those areas so all of these together these characteristics contribute to other problems that contribute to crime all of these characteristics together contribute to things like ineffective parental supervision lack of resources weak community attachment low participation in local institutions and all of that meant that community-based controls fail in disorganized areas so the people living in these areas are responding naturally to environmental conditions by creating deviant and criminal subcultures and then those deviant and criminal subcultures replace normative social values with criminal values well that's it that's all we've got about social disorganization theory hopefully you learned something new i'll see you next time