What is culture conflict theory?
Thorsten Sellin's culture conflict theory (1938) holds that each group has its own conduct norms and that crime appears when they clash: what one culture considers right, another punishes. It happens above all with migration and colonisation, when one group is subjected to another's law.
A Sicilian father avenges the affront to his daughter himself, as the honor of his homeland demands; in New York, that is homicide. His conduct has not changed, the code that judges it has. In that collision Thorsten Sellin located one of the roots of crime: not in the bad individual, but in the clash between cultures.
Culture conflict at a glance
- Author
- Thorsten Sellin
- Year / era
- 1938 (Culture Conflict and Crime)
- Family
- Sociological (structural)
- Idea
- Crime arises from the clash between the codes of conduct of different groups
Own group’s norm ≠ dominant legal code → culture-conflict “crime”// OriginCodes of conduct collide
Sellin, a Swedish-American criminologist, published Culture Conflict and Crime in the great era of migration to the United States. His central idea is conduct norms: each cultural group has its own rules about right and wrong, and they do not always coincide with the dominant legal code, usually that of the majority culture. Crime often appears when someone acts according to the norms of their group and those contradict the ones the law has made binding on everyone.
He distinguished two forms of the conflict. The primary form occurs between different cultures: the immigrant against the host country, the colonized against the law of the colonizer. The secondary form occurs within a single society split into subgroups: the neighborhood subculture, the gang, the criminal trade.
Sellin’s thesis
One group’s conduct norms may clash with another’s; obeying yours can mean breaking theirs.
Primary and secondary conflict
The first is a problem of translation between worlds, Mediterranean honor against Anglo-Saxon law; the second, of fracture within one, as a modern society splinters into subcultures with their own rules. Both share Sellin’s thesis: much of what we call crime is not the absence of norms, but loyalty to the wrong norms, wrong only from the perspective of the code that won the power to write the law.
How a cultural “crime” is manufactured, step by step
- 1Own codesEach group has its own conduct norms about what is right and what is wrong
- 2CollisionThose norms clash: the primary between different cultures, the secondary between subcultures
- 3Power writes the lawThe dominant culture turns its own norms into criminal law for everyone
- 4CriminalizationThe minority group’s normal conduct ends up defined as a crime
Much of what we call crime is not the absence of norms, but loyalty to those of the losing code.
// In fictionLives split between two codes
El Padrino is the primary conflict: he brings from Sicily a code of honor, family and reciprocity, the omertà, that was virtue in his village and is organized crime in New York; he obeys his norms to the letter. Cottonmouth, of mixed Chinese-Japanese-American descent and scorned by every group, carves her way with steel until she reigns over the yakuza, a world whose feudal code stands against all law. el forastero, a Chinese immigrant in 1870s San Francisco, is trapped between the tong wars, the racism of white law and his own sense of belonging.
The secondary conflict is born within a single society. el Tigre Blanco breaks India’s caste code, the “rooster coop” that orders everyone to know their place, and discovers that rising requires becoming a criminal in the eyes of the code that kept him down. el rey del crack builds a crack empire in Harlem with the rules of an entire subculture (business, loyalty, violence) that operates like a parallel state. None of them lives without norms; they all live under other ones.
Clashes of codes: the immigrant, the mixed-race woman, the outsider, the broken caste and the subculture. Tap to open their case file.
// PowerWho decides which code is "the crime"
Sellin’s sharpest consequence is a question about power: if every culture has its own norms, why do some become law and others crime? Because the dominant culture, the one that controls the State, turns its conduct norms into criminal law, and thereby defines the normal conduct of other groups as criminal. The clash is unequal: one of the codes has the police behind it. This idea opened the way to critical criminology, which would ask whom the law serves.
// The crackNeither relativism nor cultural alibi
Taken to the extreme, the theory drifts into a relativism that forgives everything (“it’s their culture”). Sellin did not say that. That a conduct makes sense within a code does not make it harmless: the omertà explains Vito, it does not absolve his crimes. The “cultural defense” in the courts (“back home this was done this way”) is rejected for this reason: understanding the origin of a norm does not oblige us to tolerate its victims.
The opposite crack is the xenophobic use of the theory, which sees in every immigrant a potential offender for bringing “other norms”. Sellin serves the opposite purpose: most clashes are resolved through integration and translation, not prison, and criminalizing an entire culture creates the very conflict it claims to combat.
The seed of asking whom the law serves
Sellin’s work shifted the explanation of crime from the bad individual to the clash of cultures and opened the path that the theory of subcultures and, above all, critical criminology would follow.
- 1938Sellin publishes Culture Conflict and Crime for the Social Science Research Council.
- 1942Shaw and McKay link delinquency to urban areas, in dialogue with the conflict of norms.
- 1955In parallel, Cohen develops the theory of the delinquent subculture (from Merton's strain and status frustration).
- 1973Critical criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young) takes up the question of the power to define crime.
// Why it mattersTranslate codes, not just punish
Much culture-conflict crime is prevented by reducing the clash, not by toughening the penalty: real integration, legitimate paths of advancement, institutions that mediate between the group’s norms and the law. When a society offers Ah Sahm a place to belong, or Balram a ladder to climb without breaking the law, the conflict is discharged before it becomes crime. When it offers only exclusion, it pushes people toward the subcultures where that conflict gets organized.
Strengths and shadows
- Shifts the focus from the “bad individual” to structure: crime as a clash of codes.
- Introduces the question of power (who turns their norm into law) and anticipates critical criminology.
- Explains that many “offenders” obey norms, just those of another world.
- A fertile basis for the theories of subculture and the code of the street.
- Taken to the extreme, it drifts into a relativism that forgives everything.
- It can be used in a xenophobic key, seeing in every immigrant a potential offender.
- The concept of “conduct norms” is hard to operationalize and test empirically.
- It explains crime tied to migration or subculture better than criminality in general.
Three key takeaways
- Sellin explains part of crime as a clash between the conduct norms of different cultures: whoever obeys their group’s code may be violating that of the dominant culture, which writes the law.
- He distinguishes primary conflict (between two cultures) and secondary conflict (between subcultures of one society). In both there is loyalty to other norms, not their absence.
- Its edge is power, who turns their code into law, and its risk is relativism. Preventing the conflict means integrating and translating, not just punishing.
Sources · further reading
- Sellin, T. (1938). Culture Conflict and Crime. Social Science Research Council.
- Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J. & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical Criminology. Oxford University Press.
- Sutherland, E. H. & Cressey, D. R. (1978). Criminology. Lippincott.
- Shaw, C. R. & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. University of Chicago Press.
// Test the theoryWhich of these villains does KRIMINIS analyse with Culture conflict theory?
Theory questionsFrequently asked questions
What is culture conflict theory?
Thorsten Sellin's culture conflict theory (1938) holds that each group has its own conduct norms and that crime appears when they clash: what one culture considers right, another punishes. It happens above all with migration and colonisation, when one group is subjected to another's law.
Who developed culture conflict theory, and when?
The Swedish-American criminologist Thorsten Sellin, in 1938, in the book Culture Conflict and Crime, published by the Social Science Research Council during the era of mass migration to the United States. His question about who defines crime was taken up in 1973 by the critical criminology of Taylor, Walton and Young.
Is Sellin's theory still valid? What is it criticised for?
It is influential and a forerunner of critical criminology. Its main risk is relativism: taken to the extreme, everything is excused with “it is their culture”, which is why courts reject the “cultural defence”. The opposite risk is its xenophobic use, seeing every immigrant as a potential criminal. The concept of conduct norms is also hard to test.
What is the difference between primary and secondary culture conflict?
Primary conflict pits two whole cultures against each other: the immigrant whose home code clashes with that of the host country. Secondary conflict arises within a single society that splinters into subcultures with their own norms, such as the gang or the neighbourhood. Vito Corleone illustrates the primary kind: a Sicilian code of honour that was virtue in his village and is organised crime in New York.
What are conduct norms and crime norms in Sellin's theory?
Conduct norms are a group's rules about how its members should act in a given situation; breaking them arouses a reaction from the group (Sellin, 1938). Because each group has its own, an act that violates one code may be perfectly correct in another. Crime norms are the conduct norms written into criminal law, and they reflect the values and interests of the groups that control the legislative process.
How does culture conflict arise, according to Sellin?
Sellin (1938) described three situations in which cultural codes collide: when they clash on the border between neighboring culture areas; when the law of one cultural group is extended to cover the territory of another, as happens under colonial rule; and when members of one group migrate into another. He also expected that the more heterogeneous a society becomes, the more frequent these conflicts, and therefore deviance, will be.