Albert K. Cohen Quotes (5 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Albert K. Cohen: 5 quotes0 likes

Famous Albert K. Cohen Quotes

“A learned man, Emile Durkheim,
Had much to say concerning crime
And most of what he had to say
Became a book, and so today
The thoughts he had in 1910
Are read by other learned men,
Who then proceed to write a lot
Of books on Durkheim’s life and thought,
And I am sure that someday you
Will write a book or maybe two,
Destined to be widely read,
On what they say that Durkheim said.”

Albert K. Cohen

Albert K. Cohen (1993). " The Social Functions of Crime https://www.asc41.com/Photos/Cohen_Albert_withPoem.html," at asc41.com. First part of poem presented in his Sutherland Address at the 1993 ASC meetings in Phoenix.

“In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a handicap and, to the extent that he cares what the middle-class persons think of him or has internalised the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, he may be expected to feel some 'shame.”

Albert K. Cohen

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p. 110

“It is generally assumed that… register data are more representative than court data, which are the result of a long selective process of complaint, arrest, arraignment and prosecution.”

Albert K. Cohen

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p.40

“A comparative social science requires a generalized system of concepts which will enable the scientific observer to compare and contrast large bodies of concretely different social phenomena in consistent terms.”

Albert K. Cohen

David Aberle, Albert K. Cohen, A. K. Davis, Marion J. Levy Jr. and Francis X. Sutton, (1950). T"he functional prerequisites of a society." Ethics, 60(2), p. 100; cited in: Neil J. Smelser (2013), Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences. p. 189

“We usually assume that when people steal things, they steal because they want them. They may want them because they can eat them, wear them or otherwise use them; or because they can sell them; or even-if we are given to a psychoanalytic turn of mind because on some deep symbolic level they substitute or stand for something unconsciously desired but forbidden. All of these explanations have this in common, that they assume that the stealing is a means to an end, namely, the possession of some object of value, and that it is, in this sense, rational and utilitarian. However, the fact cannot be blinked-and this fact is of crucial importance in defining our problem-that much gang stealing has no such motivation at all.”

Albert K. Cohen

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, pp. 24-32