Construct · 5 names · 8 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
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In Durkheim's sociology, anomie is a condition of society in which the shared norms that regulate people's desires and conduct have weakened or broken down. He introduced the idea in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) to name a division of labor that grows faster than the rules meant to coordinate it, and developed it in Suicide (1897), where sudden prosperity or sudden ruin leaves aspirations without limits. For Durkheim the trouble is not that people want too much but that nothing tells them when to stop, so desire becomes boundless and satisfaction impossible. The referent is a property of the social order, weak normative regulation, and not a state of mind that any one person carries. It is acute in periods of rapid change, when the old rules no longer bind and new ones have not yet formed.[2][1]
For Merton, anomie is a strain built into the structure of a society whose culture urges everyone toward the same goals of success while its institutions offer only some people the legitimate means to reach them. In Social Structure and Anomie (1938) he located the pressure not in boundless desire but in this gap between what people are told to want and what they are equipped to get. The gap produces a set of adaptations, conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion, of which acquisitive crime is one. This is a different idea from Durkheim's: anomie here is a specific disjunction between goals and legitimate means, not a general absence of norms. The word is the same and the lineage is real, but the mechanism has moved from deregulated appetite to a structural mismatch.[3]
Institutional anomie theory extends Merton by asking why the American goal of monetary success is so strong and its restraints so weak. In Crime and the American Dream, Messner and Rosenfeld argue that the economy has come to dominate other institutions, family, school, and politics, so that the pursuit of money crowds out the norms those institutions would otherwise enforce. Anomie here is neither pure normlessness nor a simple goals and means gap but an imbalance of institutional power that leaves the market's logic unchecked. Cross-national tests have used the theory to predict homicide, with several reporting lower rates where welfare provision and non-economic institutions are stronger. The referent has shifted again, from the individual's strain to the arrangement of a society's institutions.[4][5][6]
Srole's anomia is not a property of society at all but a feeling reported by an individual: the sense that the social order is unpredictable, that community leaders are indifferent, and that life is meaningless. His 1956 scale, five agree or disagree items, was built to measure this subjective state and to relate it to prejudice and social isolation. Srole deliberately spelled it anomia to mark the shift from Durkheim's societal anomie to a psychological attribute of the person. The two words differ by one letter and are often merged in practice, which is a small collision sitting inside the larger one. Treating a high anomia score as evidence of Durkheim's anomie confuses a person's feeling with a condition of the society they live in.[7]
In institutional anomie theory in business ethics, anomie refers to managers in nations whose institutions put the economy first and whose culture stresses achievement and individualism more readily justify ethically suspect acts. This meaning comes from Cullen (2004) in Academy of Management Journal.[8]
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