The Causes and Consequences of Anomie

Relying on a range of demographic and survey data and a mixture of personal anecdotes, Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor in the Sociology Department at Northeastern University, has written a book that looks at the intersection of age, birth cohort, and history. The book’s strength lies in its effort to examine anomie (or normlessness) in America (cf. Emile Durkheim’s classic work on French society) and to explore the causes and consequences of upward shifts in the degree of anomie in various social domains— shifts that can be traced to the turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s and that have continued, if not accelerated, in recent years. More specifically and in the author’s own words, Blurring the Boundaries “is about the norms of everyday life and how they have changed over the decades, not only in their substance but also in their declining rigidity” (p. 2). Although much of the book is devoted to “explaining changes in age-related norms” (hence the book’s subtitle), a larger message is intended as well. For, as Levin writes, “[i]t is not just age norms that have changed or become blurred; informal norms generally have diminished in their influence” (p. 2). As evidence for the changes, Levin points to a number of trends: a blurring of age boundaries (with “informal age norms for education, work, and family transitions” [p. 53] loosening and becoming more flexible, and “stage theories” of aging and the life course tending to “break down” [p. 66]), an erosion of childhood (“[n]ot only have the boundaries separating middle age from the elderly and adolescence from young adulthood blurred, but so too have the boundaries between teenagers and children” [p. 80]), and a relaxation of rules governing gender and sexual scripts (“either gender, as children, [can] play with trucks and dolls, join a hockey or basketball team, or engage in wrestling or boxing” [p. 28] and the “double standard by gender at work and in the bedroom . . . [has] slipp[ed] away in favor of a more egalitarian way of thinking” [p. 28]). To these, Levin adds: a rise in the popularity of open-classroom philosophies (with instruction becoming “more informally structured and flexible” [p. 14] and with grades becoming “less attached to academic performance” and subject to “inflation” [p. 13]); more incidents of cheating not just in schools but also in politics, sports, business, and entertainment (cheating and lying “have apparently infected almost every segment of our society” [p. 18]); a lessening of rules prohibiting cursing, swearing, and obscenity (profanity norms have become “increasingly vague” [p. 7]); and the flourishing practice of free-style dancing (which involves “little if any coordination with a partner” [p. 12]). There is much to admire about the book. I liked the fact that Levin introduced early theoretical notions about anomie (e.g., his reference to Durkheim’s [1893] assertion that “during periods of rapid social change, disruption, or dislocation, social norms tend to lose their ability to control the everyday activities of society’s members” [p. 9]) and that he sought to demonstrate the applicability of these notions to understanding certain segments of society today. I appreciated, too, the historical perspective, with trend lines in various graphs depicting transformations long in the making. Readers who have an abiding interest in the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s (which I, along with many others, have) will be captivated