Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory

Social Context

One of the most important shifts in theoretical development in the field of criminology occurred in the 1970s as Freda Adler and Rita Simon focused their work on female offenders, a population that had historically received little theoretical attention. Their claims that the rate of female offending was sharply escalating received much attention and generated additional research on their claims. Both scholars linked rises in female offending to expansions in the liberation of women. However, Adler highlighted increases in violent offending and cited the role of “liberation” in producing more masculine traits in women, such as competitiveness and aggression, while Simon focused on increases in property and white-collar offenses (such as fraud and larceny) and linked this jump in female offending to the greater access provided by inclusion of women in the workforce. Historically, these works served to bring women squarely into theoretical conversations about causes of offending.

Acknowledging that the role of women generally was peripheral in the development of traditional criminological theories, such early omissions provided the foundation of much research on gender and crime. In an early review of the literature, Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind identified two key questions that guide research on the role of gender in criminological theories: the generalizability problem and the gender-ratio question. The generalizability problem references the need to examine traditional theories of crime to determine [Page 414]their ability to explain female, as well as male, criminality. The gender-ratio question, in contrast, highlights the common finding that women commit less crime than do men and the need to understand this phenomenon. Power-control theory is one of the first sociological theories offered to address the latter question.

Power-control theory combines elements of stratification theories with components of control theories of crime to generate explanations for the gender difference in delinquency and to predict changes in this difference over time. Specifically, power-control theory posits that parents’ levels of power in their positions in the labor force translate into power-relations in the home (Hagan et al., 1985; Hagan et al., 1979). These power differentials are used to generate a class-based and power-based measure of patriarchy against which family types are identified. Households with a balance of power between parents are described as less patriarchal in nature, while more patriarchal households are identified as those in which fathers have greater power than mothers. Power-control theory describes the gender gap in delinquency as being widest, with girls committing significantly fewer delinquent acts than boys, in households identified as more patriarchal. The gender gap is assumed to be smaller in less patriarchal households.

...