Gang Leader for a Day

Innovate Your Life In the book, Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology student from the University of Chicago starts out simply trying to understand “how it feels to be poor and black,” and ends up spending years and years figuring out the ins and outs of a gang society (Venkatesh 14). Sudhir receives the chance of a sociologist’s lifetime to see first-hand what life is like in the projects. He follows gang leader, J.T. around and studies his life at the Robert Taylor homes for years. Throughout Venkatesh’s experience he witnesses many things some people go a lifetime without seeing. For example, he was no stranger to seeing people use drugs or get beat up by gang members. One interesting aspect of Venkatesh’s experiment is the community aspect of the gang life. Although it was hard for Venkatesh to understand during his adventure, even the gang had a sense of what it was like to help out their community and how important it was. There were a lot of aspects of the book that showed the sociological perspective of the Robert Taylor community. The book Gang Leader for a Day shows the sociological perspective by bringing Robert Merton’s structural strain theory to life. Robert Merton created the structural strain theory in 1938. This theory states that deviance occurs when a society does not give all of its member’s equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals (Conley 192). The goals Merton is referring to is the ‘American dream’; everyone wants to have a good job, a nice home, and a nice family. In the strain theory Merton talks about 5 different types of people that make up society. There are conformists, innovators, ritualists, retreatists, and rebels. Conformists are the people who accept the goals of society and the means of achieving those goals. Innovators accept the goals of society but find new means of achieving these goals. That’s where J.T. falls. Ritualists don’t really accept the goals of society but they accept the means of