Institutional anomie and justification of morally dubious behavior and violence cross-nationally: A multilevel examination
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865818785653 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Rena C Zito |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Institutional anomie and
justification of morally
dubious behavior and
violence cross-nationally:
A multilevel examination
Rena C Zito
Elon University, USA
Abstract
This study draws on insights from institutional anomie theory to examine justification of
morally dubious behavior and violence cross-nationally. Further, it builds on a burgeoning
body of multilevel institutional anomie theory and research on crime-relevant attitudes by
considering whether and how individual financial hardship intersects with anomic structural
and cultural systems at the national level, acknowledging that individual responses to anomie
may be contingent upon experiences with such hardships. Results from multilevel modeling
using data from 74,930 World Values Survey respondents in 52 nations, the World Bank, and
other organizations provide partial support for the hypotheses. Specifically, conditions of
“want amid plenty,” (Bjerregaard & Cochran, 2008a, p. 183) weakened family and education
institutions, and monetary fetishism predict justifications cross-nationally. Moreover, eco-
nomic inequality and individualism moderate the effect of financial hardship on justifications
of morally dubious actions and violence, consistent with expectations.
Keywords
Cross-national research, institutional anomie theory, justification of crime, multilevel
modeling, world values survey
Date received: 22 March 2018; accepted: 6 June 2018
Corresponding author:
Rena C Zito, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,Elon University, 2035 Campus Box, Elon, NC 27244, USA.
Email: rzito@elon.edu
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2019, Vol. 52(2) 250–271
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865818785653
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Criminologists have long observed that crime rates vary cross-nationally, leading to the
development of macro-level perspectives that emphasize the salience of nation-level
structural and cultural characteristics (e.g. Bonger, 1905/1916; Merton, 1938).
Institutional anomie theory (IAT) is among the most prominent contemporary
macro-level theories of crime causation (Messner, 2012; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994),
positing that high-crime nations are marked by economic institutional dominance and a
cultural ethos that celebrates achievement, individualism, universalism, and monetary
fetishism, or an “American Dream” ethos. Under such conditions, non-economic insti-
tutions (i.e. family, polity, and education) are weakened in their ability to regulate
behavior, producing anomie, and crime.
Although IAT is, in Durkheimian tradition, a theory of large-scale variation in crime
rates, researchers have recently begun to adapt the theory to explain individual-level
crime-relevant attitudes in a cross-national context, such as justification of bribery and
other unethical business practices (Cullen, Parboteeah, & Hoegl, 2004; Martin, Cullen,
Johnson, & Parboteeah, 2007), youth attitudes towards violence (Groß & Haußmann,
2011), and a “marketized mentality” posited to arise in response to anomic conditions
(H€
overmann, Groß, & Messner, 2016). Indeed, Messner, Thome, and Rosenfeld (2008)
contend that individual-level processes implicit in IAT represent fertile, if underdevel-
oped, ground for future development and testing of the theory. Moreover, they highlight
the need for a multilevel approach to these processes, to “identify the linkages between
the level of social systems and level of individual action” (Messner et al., 2008, p. 165).
Messner (2012) again articulated the need for criminologists to develop explanations of
crime that operate across multiple levels of analysis during his 2011 presidential address
to the American Society of Criminology, suggesting specifically that IAT could be inte-
grated with micro-level perspectives on moral decision-making to more fully account for
both individual- and national-level variation in crime. Such an approach, Messner
(2012) argued, would acknowledge the structurally and culturally embedded nature of
individual moral action.
The present research responds to these calls for multilevel IAT research on individual
action by considering individual-level and cross-national variation in a key component
of moral decision-making—the propensity of the individual to see morally dubious
behaviors, or “crimes of everyday life” (Karstedt & Farrall, 2006, p. 1011), and violence
as an acceptable courses of action. Using data from the World Values Survey, the World
Bank, and other sources, this study investigates the impact of individual financial hard-
ship and nation-level economic dominance, weakened non-economic institutions, and
the “American Dream” cultural ethos on justification of crime. It contributes to a
growing body of research on cross-national patterns in crime, first, by linking perspec-
tives across multiple levels of explanation, as suggested by Messner (2012), and it uses
multilevel methodology to simultaneously address nation-level and individual-level var-
iation, which is necessary when applying IAT to micro-level processes (Messner et al.,
2008). Second, it addresses whether and how individual financial hardship intersects
with structural anomie and cultural systems that are oriented towards achievement,
individualism, universalism, and the fetishism of money at the national level, acknowl-
edging how the expression of personal troubles may be context-dependent, an approach
relatively absent in previous examinations of IAT. Third, it examines individual justi-
fication of “everyday-life crimes” and violence rather than crime rates, the typical
Zito 251
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