Cullen and Wright subsume anomie theory under a social-support perspective of crime, while Messner and Rosenfeld discuss the relationship between markets and crime to conclude that economic organization has ambivalent effects on crime levels. The empirical chapters of this volume offer much of the richness that anomie theory has to offer. Dianne Vaughan applies anomie theory to organizational deviant subcultures in the case of NASA and the Challenger space shuttle disaster. John Hagan and Bill McCarthy build on their valuable work on youth crime and clarify their theoretical stance relative to life-course and social capital theories. Scott Menard, finally, offers a sophisticated empirical test of propositions derived from Richard Cloward s famous version of anomie theory.
Crime continues to be a delicate subject matter in the sociological discipline.
The highly volatile resonance of the crime problem in society at large may be accountable for the resurgence of individual-level analyses in recent criminological work. This book appears to set anomie theory also in that direction. But irrespective of my concerns on theoretical merits and limitations, The Future of Anomie Theory offers new food for thought in the anomie tradition. The volume surely makes good on its intent to offer theoretical extensions in the anomie tradition and materials towards the execution of stronger empirical tests and re-evaluations of prior research. As such this book is a worthwhile contribution for specialists in the anomie tradition and for criminological sociologists with theoretical interests.