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Institutional Anomie Theory

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Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

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Synonyms

American Dream; Anomie; Cross-national crime rates; Economic dominance; Institutional imbalance; Macro-social criminology

Overview

What began as a monograph aimed at accounting for the excessively high rate of violent crime in the United States (Messner and Rosenfeld 1994), Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory (IAT), an identity provided by Chamlin and Cochran (1995), is perhaps the quintessential sociological theory of crime among the more recently minted theoretical approaches over the past two or three decades. The theory is a purely macro-social theory of crime and is in fact a cross-national theory of crime stressing the interplay of social structural and cultural feature of modern nation-states as the ultimate cause of crime. The entry below traces the origins of the theory, describes the theory in detail, reviews the empirical work testing key propositions of the theory, and discusses current controversies surrounding the development of the theory.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Colvard 5062 9201, University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    Beth Bjerregaard

Authors
  1. Beth Bjerregaard
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Correspondence to Beth Bjerregaard .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  2. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

  4. Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

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Bjerregaard, B. (2014). Institutional Anomie Theory. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_217

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_217

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