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Pressured into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. Robert Agnew. 2005. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. 238 pages. $42.50.
I have always thought that strain tiieory is both one of die easiest and most difficult criminological theories to teach to undergraduate students. At one level, early formulations of strain dieory are fairly easy to teach because they have a simple, intuitive appeal. For example, Robert Merton (1938) posited in the classic article Social Structure and Anomie that deviance becomes more common when there is a disjuncture between a society's culturally cherished goals and die ability of individuals to achieve those goals through legitimate means. This is a straightforward idea that undergraduate students have little difficulty absorbing. However, strain dieory has evolved over the last 50 years into one of the most sophisticated-and-complicated-areas of criminological dieory. This increasing sophistication, while exciting for criminologists generally, makes mis area much more challenging to explore in undergraduate criminology courses.
Robert Agnew's recent book, Pressured into Crime, provides a very straightforward introduction to one contemporary version of strain theory. Over the course of his career Agnew has sought to refine strain dieory by combining it widi more recent work in me area of me social-psychology of stress. The result of his efforts, General Strain Theory (GST), now stands as one of die most important, albeit complicated, theoretical ideas to emerge from the strain theoretical tradition. This book is his most general treatment of the subject. In brief, Agnew's GST focuses on examining how strains (or stressors), which he defines as "...events or conditions that are...