When the structural foundations of society destabilize, individuals often experience a profound sense of disconnection, disorientation, and moral deregulation. Anomie represents one of sociology’s and social psychology’s foundational constructs, capturing the acute crisis that emerges when collective rules, values, and expectations lose their regulatory authority over individual conduct. Understanding this state of normlessness provides essential insight into modern pathologies ranging from widespread institutional alienation to escalating rates of deviance and existential despair.
Anomie
1. Concise Definition
Anomie is a condition of societal instability or individual psychological deregulation resulting from the breakdown, absence, or confusion of social norms, values, and standards of conduct. In sociological theory, it describes a structural state where collective moral consciousness no longer regulates individual desires and expectations, creating a mismatch between culturally prescribed aspirations and socially structured opportunities. Psychologically, it refers to an internal sense of alienation, isolation, aimlessness, and purposelessness experienced by individuals navigating an insufficiently integrated social environment.
First systematically conceptualized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim and later substantially reconceptualized by American sociologist Robert K. Merton, anomie bridges the structural dynamics of macro-level institutions with micro-level human experience. When social norms fail to provide coherent boundaries, individuals do not achieve liberation; instead, they are cast into an agonizing state of perpetual longing, where limits are indistinct, fulfillment is structurally elusive, and moral coherence dissolves.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term anomie originates from the Ancient Greek word anomia (ανομíα), composed of the negative prefix a- (α-, meaning “without” or “lacking”) and nomos (νóμος, meaning “law,” “custom,” or “convention”). Hence, its etymological root translates directly to “lawlessness” or “the state of being without law.” In classical Greek texts, such as the works of Euripides and Plato, anomia was frequently employed to designate contempt for established divine or civic laws, moral corruption, and defiance of political legitimacy.
The concept entered the Western philosophical lexicon during the late Renaissance and early modern periods, appearing occasionally in English theological discourse during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to designate a spiritual state of disregard for divine ordinance. However, the term was formally naturalized into modern sociological terminology by French philosopher and moralist Jean-Marie Guyau in his 1885 work Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction. Guyau viewed anomie in a largely positive, emancipatory light, conceiving it as a state of individual moral autonomy free from dogmatic, external moral mandates. It was Émile Durkheim who borrowed the term, radically inverted its normative connotations, and established it as a diagnostic concept designating pathological social deregulation.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
Pronunciation: The word is pronounced phonetically in American English as /ˈænəmi/ (AN-uh-mee) and in British English as /ˈænəʊmi/ or /ˈænəmi/. The alternative French spelling anomie is almost universally retained in academic English, although the anglicized spelling anomy appears infrequently in older literature.
Grammatical Form: Anomie functions primarily as an uncountable abstract noun. Its adjectival derivative is anomic (/əˈnɒmɪk/ or /əˈnɑːmɪk/), used to describe institutions, social conditions, behaviors, or affective states marked by normative breakdown (e.g., “anomic suicide,” “anomic division of labor”). In social psychology, the variant noun anomia is frequently utilized to demarcate the internalized, subjective psychological orientation of normlessness and personal alienation, distinguishing the subjective experience from the macro-sociological structural condition designated by anomie.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
At its core, anomie captures what occurs when the collective moral architecture that binds a community together fractures. In any stable social system, shared beliefs, rituals, traditions, and institutionalized expectations serve a dual purpose: they facilitate mutual predictability among actors and place necessary internal boundaries upon individual appetite and ambition. When human beings are adequately integrated into a collective order, social norms establish what is reasonable to expect, what constitutes a meaningful life, and what boundaries must not be transgressed. When these norms deteriorate, human desires become unmoored from external regulation.
Unlike non-human animals, whose biological instincts impose natural biological ceilings on material consumption and physical needs, human beings possess reflective consciousness and imaginative capacity, rendering human desire theoretically infinite. Human beings can indefinitely expand their desires for wealth, prestige, recognition, power, and sensory pleasure. Because biological mechanisms alone cannot signal when enough has been acquired, only a moral authority outside the individual—namely, society—can define realistic limits and legitimate pathways for human striving. When society experiences rapid economic upheaval, sudden political collapse, accelerated technological shifts, or cultural disorientation, its capacity to impose these regulatory boundaries weakens, plunging individuals into a state of chronic, unquenchable frustration.
Moreover, anomie involves not merely the absence of rules, but the proliferation of contradictory rules. In contemporary post-industrial societies, individuals are frequently bombarded with conflicting ideological messages: they are urged to pursue unbounded personal ambition and material prosperity, yet confronted with structured structural barriers, rigid hierarchies, and systemic inequalities. The breakdown of coherent normative consensus generates cynicism regarding the fairness of institutional rules. When individuals observe that adherence to conventional norms no longer guarantees security, social respect, or self-actualization, compliance with moral codes declines, fostering institutional disengagement and interpersonal mistrust.
The subjective experience of anomie, or anomia, is characterized by profound psychological distress. Individuals navigate an overwhelming existential landscape characterized by decision paralysis, cynicism, alienation, and chronic anxiety. Bereft of clear social compasses, persons struggle to construct stable identities, evaluate their self-worth, or maintain faith in the future. The resulting isolation undermines social solidarity, fracturing communities into atomized units competing against one another within a perceived moral vacuum.
5. Historical Development
The academic development of anomie spans more than a century, evolving across several distinct intellectual epochs:
Durkheimian Foundations (1893–1897): Émile Durkheim introduced anomie in his doctoral dissertation, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), where he analyzed the transition from pre-industrial mechanical solidarity (grounded in collective conscience and structural similarity) to modern organic solidarity (grounded in functional specialization and interdependence). Durkheim argued that modern industrial economies developed at an unprecedented pace that outstripped the development of corresponding moral and legal frameworks, generating an “anomic division of labor” where capital and labor clashed in unregulated friction. Four years later, in his landmark empirical investigation Suicide (1897), Durkheim operationalized anomie as a major etiology of self-destructive behavior, demonstrating that anomic suicide spiked not only during severe economic depressions, but counterintuitively during sudden economic booms, because both disrupted the moral equilibrium that regulated expectations.
Mertonian Structural Strain (1938–1968): Four decades later, American sociologist Robert K. Merton significantly reconfigured the construct within American functionalist sociology in his seminal paper, “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938). Merton shifted the focus from Durkheim’s unregulated desires to structural imbalance. He defined anomie as a cultural and structural dissociation between culturally valued goals (such as monetary success in the “American Dream”) and institutionalized, legitimate means available for achieving them (such as access to high-quality education and well-paying employment). For Merton, anomie was not merely a consequence of sudden disruption, but a chronic, institutionalized feature of societies that overemphasize end-goals while systematically denying vast segments of the population access to legitimate means.
Psychological Operationalization (1950s–1970s): During the mid-twentieth century, researchers sought to measure the micro-level psychological correlates of structural anomie. Sociologist Leo Srole (1956) formulated the Anomia Scale, distinguishing structural anomie from individual “anomia”—the generalized feeling that community leaders are indifferent to personal needs, that the social order is fickle and unpredictable, and that personal relationships are transitory. Simultaneously, criminologists and social theorists like Albert K. Cohen, Richard Cloward, and Lloyd Ohlin synthesized Merton’s anomie theory with subcultural and differential association theories to explain delinquent gangs and juvenile misconduct.
Modern Revivals and Institutional Anomie (1990s–Present): In the 1990s, criminologists Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld revitalized the construct by formulating Institutional Anomie Theory. They argued that American society’s intense market-driven ethos systematically subordinates non-economic institutions—such as the family, education, and the political process—to the singular imperative of economic efficiency. When non-economic institutions lose their moral authority, social controls collapse, unleashing extraordinarily high rates of instrumental criminal behavior. Today, anomie is widely utilized to analyze the disruptive impacts of globalized financialization, digital hyperconnectivity, algorithmic isolation, and post-truth political landscapes.
6. Theoretical Foundations
The theoretical architecture of anomie rests primarily upon two major intellectual paradigms: Durkheimian functionalist macro-sociology and Mertonian structural strain theory, augmented by contemporary institutional perspectives.
Durkheim’s theoretical framework is rooted in his concept of homo duplex—the dual nature of human existence. Humans possess a biological, sensory nature oriented toward immediate self-preservation and pleasure, and a social, spiritual nature shaped by collective representations, culture, and morality. The collective conscience provides the regulatory scaffolding that domesticates individual biological drives. For Durkheim, society is an indispensable moral entity that performs an integrative function (binding people together through shared bonds) and a regulatory function (setting limits on individual appetites). When rapid social change weakens these regulatory mechanisms, anomie emerges. Without limits, expectations become boundless, rendering genuine contentment structurally impossible and elevating existential despair.
Merton’s Structural Strain paradigm approaches anomie from an alternative analytical vantage point. Rather than focusing on unbridled organic desires, Merton analyzes the cultural system and the social structure as two distinct components of a society. The cultural system defines goals, purposes, and interests held out as legitimate objectives for all members of society, while the social structure defines, regulates, and controls the acceptable modes of achieving these goals. Anomie develops when there is an acute disjunction between these two elements. In societies where cultural goals are heavily emphasized across all strata without commensurate expansion of legitimate institutional opportunities, strain occurs. Merton posited five distinct modes of individual adaptation to this structural strain:
- Conformity: Acceptance of both cultural goals and institutionalized means, representing the bedrock of social stability.
- Innovation: Acceptance of cultural goals alongside the rejection or circumvention of legitimate means, often leading to instrumental crime, fraud, and unconventional entrepreneurial endeavors.
- Ritualism: Abandonment or scaling down of ambitious cultural goals while continuing compulsively and rigidly to adhere to institutionalized norms and bureaucratic rules.
- Retreatism: Rejection of both cultural goals and legitimate means, culminating in societal withdrawal, substance addiction, vagrancy, or severe psychological retreat.
- Rebellion: Complete rejection of both prevailing cultural goals and institutional means, coupled with proactive efforts to introduce an entirely new social, economic, or political order.
Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), developed by Messner and Rosenfeld, extends Merton’s insights by asserting that anomie is not merely an unintended byproduct of class stratification, but the direct structural consequence of an unbalanced institutional balance of power. When the free-market economy becomes dominant, cultural values of universalism, individualism, and monetary fetishism penetrate all social spheres. Consequently, foundational socializing institutions like families and educational systems can no longer effectively transmit moral restraint or social responsibility, leaving instrumental calculation as the sole guiding principle of human conduct.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
Anomie manifests across multiple conceptual dimensions and distinct typologies across macro-sociological and micro-psychological domains:
- Structural/Societal Anomie: A macro-level property of a social system characterized by the dissolution of shared norms, ineffective institutional governance, and the failure of regulatory frameworks to manage group tensions and structural inequalities.
- Psychological Anomie (Anomia): A subjective, micro-level cognitive and affective state experienced by individuals, characterized by feelings of powerlessness, pervasive social isolation, moral cynicism, and the perception that the social world is chaotic, unjust, and arbitrary.
- Acute Anomie: Temporary, catastrophic normative disruption precipitated by sudden crises, such as economic depressions, market crashes, hyperinflation, natural disasters, revolutions, or abrupt institutional collapse.
- Chronic Anomie: A permanent, systemic feature of advanced industrial and post-industrial capitalist societies, characterized by perpetual economic competition, unceasing commodification, and institutionalized expectations of boundless material consumption.
- Economic Anomie: The erosion of moral boundaries within the economic sphere, where market transactions, corporate practices, and profit-seeking behaviors are unmoored from ethical responsibilities and obligations to the common good.
- Normative Ambiguity: A dimension of anomie characterized by the proliferation of pluralistic, fragmented, and mutually contradictory moral codes, leaving actors uncertain regarding which norms hold legitimate authority.
- Structural-Means Disjunction: The objective gap between cultural expectations of upward socioeconomic mobility and the stratified, unequal distribution of institutional pathways necessary to fulfill those expectations.
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
To grasp how anomie operates in concrete reality, several historical and contemporary examples serve as potent illustrations:
The Post-Soviet Transition (1990s): Following the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the institutional structures that had comprehensively organized civic, economic, and moral life for more than seven decades abruptly dissolved. The immediate transition to unregulated capitalism produced acute anomie across the former Soviet republics. Traditional ideological assumptions, guaranteed employment pathways, and state-sanctioned norms evaporated, while vast segments of the population were thrust into extreme poverty alongside the rapid rise of an oligarchic elite. This profound normative vacuum coincided with catastrophic increases in violent crime, institutionalized corruption, organized crime syndicates, widespread alcoholism, and a precipitous decline in life expectancy, particularly among working-age men—a classic manifestation of anomic crisis.
Subprime Mortgage Meltdown and Corporate Malfeasance: The financial collapse of 2007–2008 illustrates chronic institutional anomie within the global banking sector. Driven by extreme cultural imperatives prioritizing short-term profit maximization, compensation bonuses, and speculative growth, major financial institutions engaged in widespread predatory lending practices, the distribution of toxic collateralized debt obligations, and systematic deception of regulatory bodies. The pursuit of monetary triumph was detached from ethical considerations or broader economic health, perfectly exemplifying Merton’s “innovation” mode of adaptation at an institutional scale.
The Opioid Epidemic in Deindustrialized Regions: The widespread surge of synthetic opioid dependency and related “deaths of despair” (a concept popularized by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton) across rust-belt communities in the United States highlights chronic retreatist anomie. With the historic collapse of manufacturing jobs, whole communities lost not only their economic foundations, but also the organizing social structures, dignity, and civic rituals that provided life with coherence and purpose. Confronted with a pervasive disjunction between traditional expectations of middle-class stability and the bleak reality of generational poverty, widespread substance abuse emerged as a tragic, structural form of retreatism.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Sociologists, social psychologists, and criminologists have devised varied methodological instruments to operationalize and quantify anomie across both micro and macro levels of analysis:
Leo Srole’s Anomia Scale (1956): The most widely cited instrument for measuring subjective psychological anomie, Srole’s scale assesses individual perceptions of social integration across five distinct domains using standardized Likert items:
- Perception that community leaders are detached from and indifferent to the needs of the average citizen.
- Perception that the social order is fickle, chaotic, and fundamentally unpredictable.
- Perception that the individual and their family are losing ground socioeconomically rather than advancing.
- Perception that human relationships are fleeting, unreliable, and instrumental.
- Perception that life is fundamentally meaningless and that personal goals cannot be realized.
The McClosky-Schaar Anomy Scale (1965): Developed by Herbert McClosky and John Schaar, this scale expanded upon Srole’s framework by shifting the locus of measurement toward cognitive and intellectual disorientation. It measures an individual’s inability to comprehend the social world, marked by beliefs that common moral standards have deteriorated, that modern society is incomprehensible, and that people have lost their foundational sense of right and wrong.
Macro-Sociological Proxy Indicators: At the macro-level, sociologists assess structural anomie through aggregated statistical indices rather than self-report inventories. Standard empirical proxies include sharp shifts in suicide rates (specifically evaluated through Durkheim’s framework), property and violent crime rates, divorce and domestic dissolution statistics, levels of electoral absenteeism, voluntary association membership rates, and standardized social trust indicators measured through broad surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the World Values Survey (WVS).
10. Applications & Practical Significance
The construct of anomie maintains critical diagnostic and applied value across numerous contemporary disciplines:
Criminology and Justice Policy: Criminologists utilize anomie to identify structural determinants of crime that transcend simple individual psychopathology. Rather than focusing exclusively on punitive individual deterrence, anomie-informed criminological interventions emphasize remediating institutional blockages, expanding access to vocational and educational opportunities, and strengthening communal social safety nets. Understanding delinquency as an innovative adaptation to structural strain redirects policy toward equitable social investment.
Organizational Behavior and Corporate Governance: In organizational settings, chronic anomie emerges when leadership prioritizes quarterly earnings and aggressive growth targets while ignoring ethical codes and employee wellbeing. This normative ambiguity breeds toxic corporate cultures marked by fraudulent reporting, internal sabotage, and employee disengagement. Human resource scholars apply anomie theory to design transparent organizational codes of conduct, align compensation structures with ethical practices, and foster authentic institutional missions that shield workers from moral disillusionment.
Public Health and Epidemiology: Public health researchers apply anomie to explore “deaths of despair,” health disparities, and healthcare compliance. When public trust in medical and state institutions fractures, communities become vulnerable to misinformation, medical non-compliance, and health-compromising behaviors. Rebuilding institutional legitimacy and communal solidarity is increasingly recognized as a foundational public health intervention.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
Decades of empirical investigation across sociology, criminology, and psychology have validated the primary premises of anomie theory, while refining its precise mechanisms:
In a comprehensive test of Institutional Anomie Theory, Messner and Rosenfeld (1997) conducted cross-national comparative analyses across dozens of industrialized nations. Their findings demonstrated that societies with unrestrained market orientations and weak institutional welfare systems consistently displayed significantly higher homicide rates than countries with robust welfare regimes—such as the Nordic democracies—where the family, healthcare, and education are insulated from purely market-driven logic.
Extending Mertonian strain theory into clinical and psychological domains, Robert Agnew formulated General Strain Theory (GST) in 1992. Agnew expanded the construct beyond macro-structural socioeconomic strain, demonstrating empirically that individual-level strains—such as the anticipation of failure to achieve positively valued goals, the removal of positively valued stimuli (e.g., death of a loved one, job loss), and the presentation of noxious stimuli (e.g., abusive environments)—engender intense negative affective states, particularly anger and frustration. In the absence of legitimate coping mechanisms, these emotional states robustly predict delinquent adaptations, violent outbursts, and substance dependency.
Contemporary longitudinal studies utilizing data from the World Values Survey have further confirmed the direct relationship between subjective anomia, economic deregulation, and declining social capital. Research led by European scholars during the post-2008 austerity measures revealed that nations subjected to rapid public expenditure reductions experienced marked spikes in subjective anomia, which correlated with declines in interpersonal trust, institutional cynicism, and surges in support for radical, anti-establishment political movements.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
The manifestations, experiences, and social ramifications of anomie vary substantially across cultural frameworks and civilizational models:
Individualistic versus Collectivistic Cultures: In highly individualistic societies, such as the United States, the cultural imperative toward personal achievement and self-sufficiency exacerbates anomic strain. When individuals in these cultures experience socioeconomic failure, the culture encourages them to internalize blame, amplifying feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and despair. In contrast, collectivistic societies (e.g., traditional East Asian cultures) often possess dense, highly institutionalized kinship systems, communal rituals, and expectations of mutual obligation that buffer individuals against normative isolation, even during periods of intense economic disruption.
Post-Colonial and Transitional Societies: Anomie frequently manifests with acute intensity across post-colonial societies. The historical imposition of Western legal frameworks, educational paradigms, and market systems frequently fractured indigenous normative systems, kinship systems, and ancestral dispute-resolution rituals. Modern populations in these settings often find themselves caught between competing normative universes: traditional tribal or familial expectations on the one hand, and bureaucratic, market-driven obligations on the other. This cultural fragmentation produces a deep-seated structural anomie that can challenge post-colonial state legitimacy and civic integration.
The Impact of Rapid Modernization: In emerging economies undergoing rapid, accelerated industrialization—such as contemporary China, India, and parts of Southeast Asia—the speed of economic transformation has generated dramatic internal normative clashes. The transition from agrarian village life to hyper-dense, competitive megacities has severed historical community ties, generating profound generational disconnects and widespread alienation among internal migrant populations navigating poorly regulated labor landscapes.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
Despite its enduring foundational status, the construct of anomie has drawn substantial theoretical, methodological, and political critiques over the decades:
Critiques of Durkheimian Functionalism: Durkheim’s formulation has been criticized for conservative ideological assumptions. By viewing anomie as an absence of societal regulation and assuming that human nature requires external moral restraint, Durkheim implicitly framed existing social structures as intrinsically benign. Feminist and conflict theorists argue that what Durkheim diagnosed as “normlessness” was often legitimate resistance against oppressive, patriarchal, and class-stratified social orders. From this perspective, the enforcement of “normative order” can serve as an instrument of social domination rather than benevolent integration.
Critiques of Mertonian Strain: Merton’s strain theory has faced scrutiny for overestimating working-class deviance and underestimating crimes committed by the powerful. Critics note that Merton focused primarily on lower-class property crime and street delinquency as an innovative adaptation to structural blockages, failing to adequately account for elite white-collar crime, which occurs among individuals who possess unrestricted access to legitimate institutional means. Furthermore, critics argue that Merton posited an overly homogeneous cultural consensus, erroneously assuming that all members of an ethnically, racially, and socially pluralistic society internalize the identical “American Dream.”
Methodological Confounding: Social psychologists have debated whether empirical instruments measuring “anomia” (such as Srole’s scale) genuinely capture a unique sociological construct, or whether they merely reflect generalized neuroticism, clinical depression, or alienation. Disentangling subjective normlessness from broader psychiatric symptom patterns remains an ongoing methodological challenge in empirical sociology and personality psychology.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
To prevent conceptual confusion, anomie must be carefully distinguished from related constructs across the social sciences:
- Alienation (Marxist Entfremdung): While anomie involves the absence, confusion, or breakdown of social norms and moral boundaries, alienation refers to the systematic estrangement of individuals from the products of their labor, from their creative potential (Gattungswesen), and from their fellow human beings due to exploitative socio-economic relations. Anomie is a condition of moral deregulation; alienation is a condition of powerlessness and existential dispossession within a rigid system of production.
- Nihilism: Nihilism is an intentional philosophical orientation that asserts that life, existence, and traditional moral systems lack objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Anomie, by contrast, is a sociological and psychological state of moral deregulation and confusion. An individual experiencing anomie may desperately yearn for moral clarity and social purpose but cannot find stable structures to provide them, whereas a philosophical nihilist actively rejects the ontological validity of such structures.
- Fatalism: In Durkheim’s typology of suicide, fatalism represents the diametric opposite of anomie. Whereas anomie results from insufficient social regulation, fatalism arises from extreme, inescapable over-regulation and oppressive social control that violently blocks individual agency and suffocates personal aspirations (e.g., individuals living under brutal carceral regimes or totalitarian systems).
- Egoism: Another Durkheimian counterpart, egoism refers to a state of insufficient social integration (weak interpersonal bonds and detachment from community life), whereas anomie refers to a state of insufficient social regulation (weak moral guidance and normlessness). While egoism concerns whether an individual feels connected to others, anomie concerns whether an individual’s desires and ambitions are bound by shared moral standards.
15. Summary & Key Takeaways
Anomie remains one of the most powerful diagnostic concepts in the social sciences for understanding the psychological and behavioral disruptions that accompany institutional decay and societal transformation. Emerging etymologically from the Greek term for “lawlessness,” the construct was forged by Émile Durkheim to designate the acute, painful condition of moral deregulation that occurs when rapid socioeconomic changes strip society of its ability to guide human appetite. It was systematically expanded by Robert K. Merton to illuminate the chronic structural strains that arise when societies promote universal ambitions of success while systematically blocking legitimate pathways for their achievement.
Whether observed in the historical wreckage of post-Soviet transitions, the predatory practices of unconstrained financial institutions, or the quiet despair of communities hollowed out by deindustrialization, anomie illuminates the profound psychological truth that absolute personal freedom devoid of normative boundaries does not produce human liberation. Human wellbeing requires not only structural opportunity and physical sustenance, but also coherent, legitimate, and morally authoritative communities capable of infusing human striving with boundaries, direction, and shared existential purpose.
References
- Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30(1), 47–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01093.x
- Durkheim, É. (1951). Suicide: A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1897). https://archive.org/details/suicidestudyinso00durk
- Durkheim, É. (1984). The division of labour in society (W. D. Halls, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published 1893). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17729-5
- Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084686
- Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2012). Crime and the American dream (5th ed.). Cengage Learning. https://www.cengage.com/c/crime-and-the-american-dream-5e-messner/9781111346041/
- Srole, L. (1956). Social integration and certain corollaries: An exploratory study. American Sociological Review, 21(6), 709–716. https://doi.org/10.2307/2088422