Anomie and culture management: reappraising Durkheim

Article

Anomie and culture management: reappraising Durkheim

Phil JohnsonManagement School, University of Sheffield, UK

Joanne DuberleyThe Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, UK

AbstractThis research investigates how recent approaches to culture management have tacitly assimilated Merton’s and Mayo’s reformulations of Durkheim’s theory of anomie. This reformulation legitimates an instrumental focus upon the need for ‘experts’ to regulate the means by which naturalized utilitarian ends are pursued by developing culture management practices that aim to (re)integrate the mal-socialized. In contrast to this technocratic approach, we explore how Durkheim’s original formulation of anomie, far from accepting utilitarian ends as givens, articulated concerns about the unfettering of egoism he saw to be engendered by the classical liberal free market assumptions at the heart of utilitarianism. How this free market ethos, articulated by recent neoliberal discourses, guides the content and processes of post-bureaucratic culture management manoeuvres is then investigated. This article concludes by showing how, from Durkheim’s stance, such managerial processes paradoxically serve to express and propagate the incidence of anomie. In stark contrast, as a means of re-establishing social cohesion as a bulwark against anomie whilst protecting individual freedoms, Durkheim’s communitarian agenda emphasized the need to establish an organic solidarity, knowingly agreed by all on an equal basis, thereby potentially legitimating a more democratic approach to organizational governance that has contemporary relevance.

Keywords Anomie, communitarianism, culture management, neoliberalism, post-bureaucracy

IntroductionIn this article we argue that Emile Durkheim’s (1964 [1893], 1951 [1897], 1960 [1912], 1957 [1928]) development of the classical sociological concept of anomie has a significant, if sometimes

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misrepresented, relevance to key currents in contemporary management discourse. This is not least because underpinning Durkheim’s theory of anomie is the assumption that people may think and act on the basis of subjective meanings and values which may coalesce, through processes of reciprocal social influence, into a shared culture that normatively regulates both the means and the ends of human behaviour. For Durkheim, a condition of anomie develops when either the processes by which moral norms converge and are sustained, through stable patterns of social interaction, become disrupted, or, through the spread of particular cultural norms that unleash egoism. With either pro-cess, according to Durkheim, due to the resultant moral and ethical disorder, society and its institu-tions fail to effectively place normative limits upon individual desires and their efficacious pursuit.

In the past 20 years, numerous scholars have repeatedly highlighted the breakdown of ‘com-munity’ in contemporary society with increasing levels of social fragmentation, competitive indi-vidualism, normlessness, uncertainty and anxiety (e.g. Beck, 1992; Bellah et al., 1992; Etzioni, 1995, 1998; Putnam, 1998; Sennett, 2006; Webster et al., 2008). For Mestrovic, this has resulted in an age ‘drowning in anomie’ (1991: 107). In a similar vein Mangham locates repeated crises in the governance of contemporary capitalist institutions in what he sees as the ‘damage done to our ethical climate by unbridled capitalism’ (2005: 519) as expressed in: various forms of corporate ‘cannibalism’ and greed (Korten, 1995); repeated corporate scandals (Swartz and Watkins, 2003); and in recent furores about incentive schemes in worldwide banking and UK parliamentary expenses. Given this context it would seem timely to revisit Durkheim’s theory of anomie and consider its implications for how we understand recent developments in workplace governance.

Anomie theory appears to have a particular resonance with much contemporary management discourse. For instance, several management theorists (e.g. Darhler-Larsen, 1994; Ray, 1986; Starkey, 1998) have explored how proponents of corporate culture, as a mode of management control, had implicitly stumbled upon Durkheim’s theory of anomie. Since this work, the ‘cultural turn’ seems to continue apace and acquired some ubiquity in the management lexicon (see: Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Grugulis et al., 2000; Willmott, 2003). This status may have been further consolidated because traditional bureaucratic forms of management control are often pre-sented as failing (see: Applebaum et al., 2000; Hendry, 2006; Josserand et al., 2006; Laffin, 1998; Osbourne and Plastrik, 1998) and thus, it is assumed, require replacement by more viable alterna-tives. Nevertheless, the issue of anomie in organizational governance has attracted little direct attention in the management field (for some exceptions to this see: Hodson, 1999; Johnson and Smith, 1999; Ouchi and Johnson, 1978; Tsahuridu, 2006). In this article we seek to contribute to this literature by exploring how management theorists’ formulations of contemporary organiza-tional problems and their resolution have tacitly assimilated Merton’s (1938, 1957, 1964, 1967) and Mayo’s (1933, 1949) reformulations of Durkheim’s theory of anomie. It is in this form that anomie continues to have a significant, if largely unacknowledged, conceptual influence upon much management theorization. However, this reformulation, which took place largely in a North American social context, has led to an instrumental focus upon the need to regulate the means by which ends are achieved through improvements in organizational functioning without considering, or questioning, the nature of those performative goals.

In contrast, as we shall argue, Durkheim’s original formulation of anomie, far from naturalizing ends as givens, would, in an anti-performative manner, critically inspect their provenance and substance in the governance of organizations. The irony here is that a key cause of the moral dis-order that was a focus of Durkheim’s original work has often been naturalized through the contem-porary appropriation of what Durkheim would have seen as utilitarian free-market assumptions. Such assumptions were earlier also reified and privileged by both Mayo and Merton within a func-tionalist means-ends calculus that assumed particular ends as incorrigible givens.



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Therefore the aim of this article is to investigate, with specific reference to recent culture management discourses, how anomie has tacitly developed as a conceptual tool for constituting, analysing, and identifying solutions to, the problems that are (re)presented as assailing work orga-nizations. In pursuit of this aim, this article is structured as follows: We begin by reappraising Durkheim’s original theoretical presentation of anomie and its relevance to Etzioni’s recent com-munitarian critique of the erosion of community driven by unregulated free-market capitalism. We then explore how Durkheim’s theory was reformulated through the work of Merton and more directly applied to management and organizations by Mayo. We then consider the articulation of anomie in contemporary management theory and practice with a focus upon the much heralded demise of bureaucratic modes of management control and their necessary replacement by alterna-tive cohesion-building mechanisms: namely organization culture management manoeuvres. Here we illustrate how this recent narrative continues to articulate the technocratic concerns of Merton and Mayo and privileges utilitarianism through the hegemony of neoliberal institutional agendas where, as Cerny (2008) has argued, people are forced to be ‘free’ by purposefully opening up orga-nizational life to market forces. We conclude by presenting a Durkheimian critique which legiti-mates a more democratic approach to organizational governance and has been largely suppressed by the continuing discursive power of Merton and Mayo’s reformulations.

Durkheim and anomieEmile Durkheim’s theory of anomie (1951, 1964) was initially located in his view that individuals were incapable of controlling their own, insatiable, passions and desires and therefore exterior social force was required as ‘a curb to regulate them’ (1951: 258). He considered that these disposi-tions were relatively stable and therefore he was interested in exploring the link between variable social conditions and the patterns of deviant behaviour that developed. Normally, according to Durkheim, through moral constraint, a collective social order served to define and regulate the goals to which human beings should orientate their behaviour. For Durkheim, those socially derived ‘collective ideas and practices ... remain constant so long as the conditions on which they depend are themselves the same’ (1951: 387). However, should this collective representational order break down, due to rapid technological, social or economic change, for instance, society’s regulatory apparatus is put under strain as traditional behavioural rules lose their authority and as aspirations to strive for ‘infinite’ or ‘receding’ goals outstrip the possibilities of their fulfilment. In such conditions a state of crisis, or ‘anomie’, ensues (1951: 247–257).

At the end of the 19th century, Durkheim (1964) argued that one effect of the major economic and social changes that he saw to be accompanying rapid industrialization and urbanization was the development of an increasingly complex and specialized division of labour. For Durkheim, the resultant plurality of social settings, in which the individual gains social experience and a sense of self-identity, engendered uncertainty regarding what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Indeed he thought that the dislocating and atomizing trajectory of modernization had undermined the tradi-tional social order provided by mechanical solidarity: ‘... a more or less organized totality of beliefs and sentiments common to all members ...’ (Durkheim, 1964: 99). Located in the common experi-ence and shared religious practices of a relatively socially undifferentiated rural population, the individual had been subordinated to a uniform system of shared values, beliefs and sentiments: an externally constraining ‘conscience collective’ (Durkheim, 1964: 129) which enveloped individual consciousness and normatively specified both members’ goals and the legitimate means they might use to achieve them. For Durkheim the undermining of mechanical solidarity liberated the indi-vidual from the constraints of tradition and dogma. But, it had also sown the seeds of moral




deregulation, anarchy and conflict, especially in the economic sphere, for it had disintegrated without the development of any alternative effective form of social solidarity to replace it. It is the resultant state of ‘regle de dereglement’, ‘a rule that is a lack of rule’ (1951: 257), of collective disorganization or derangement, that Durkheim called ‘anomie’.

For Durkheim anomie was an abnormal, transitional, state of affairs, of disequilibrium, charac-terized by a condition of moral lawlessness which caused social disorder because ...

... nothing remains but individual appetites, since they are by nature boundless and insatiable, if there is nothing to control them they will not be able to control themselves … the manufacturer, the businessman, the worker, the employee … is subject to no influence set above him which contains his egoism, nor to any moral discipline, and, as a result, he dispenses with all discipline of this kind. (Durkheim, 1957: 11–12)

Durkheim (1951: 247–257) clearly thought that his observations about the endemic nature of ano-mie applied to everyone involved in ‘trade and industry’, ‘from top to bottom of the ladder’. It was the pressure to strive for what he described as ‘infinite’ and ever ‘receding’ goals that generated a break down in regulatory norms that characterizes anomie. These desires are …

... insatiable by definition … Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command … to pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness (Durkheim, 1951: 247–248) … These dispositions (self-interested striving towards indefinite goals) are so inbred that society has grown to accept them as normal … The longing for infinity is daily represented as a mark of moral distinction, whereas it can only appear within unregulated consciences which elevate to a rule the lack of a rule from which they suffer. (Durkheim, 1951: 257)

Anomie and utilitarianismAccording to some scholars (e.g. Adair, 2008; Cladis, 1991; Mestrovic, 1992; Pearce, 2001; Wolfe, 1989), Durkheim was drawing attention to the consequences of utilitarian philosophy, especially that of Spencer, and its promotion of laissez-faire classical political liberalism. As Pearce (2001: 104) observes, utilitarianism assumed that individuals’ freedom to maximize their utility, by ratio-nally choosing the best means to pursue their egoistic ends in a laissez-fare economy, would pro-duce in the interests of all, thanks to the hidden-hand of the competitive market place, maximum efficiency and material abundance whilst distributing rewards according to merit and thereby ensure a ‘positive morality’ that was emancipatory (see also Etzioni, 1988: 1). Durkheim saw the burgeoning hegemony of this free-market economic thought and practice as raising economic materialism and self-interest ‘to an end transcending itself … the supreme end of individuals and society alike’ (Durkheim: 1951: 254–257). For Durkheim, the unbridling of capitalism through the operation of self-regulating markets was antipathetic to the operation of a moral order based upon reciprocal social obligations as a guide to appropriate behaviour. The result was that there would be little to restrain the economically powerful from overwhelming the weaker.

As Cerny (2008) has recently observed, classical 19th century liberalism has now evolved into the hegemonic neoliberal paradigm that includes an active role for the state in designing, promoting and guaranteeing the free and efficient operation of the market (see also Harvey, 2005). Durkheim’s con-cerns about classical liberalism are instructive here as he feared that a whole range of activities associ-ated with business were ‘almost entirely removed from the moderating effect of obligations’ (Durkheim, 1957: 10). Indeed, with an almost prescient contemporary relevance, Durkheim observed that …




… government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant. Industry, instead of being still regarded as a means to an end … has become the supreme end of individuals and societies alike. Thereupon the appetites thus excited have become freed of any limiting authority. (Durkheim, 1951: 255)

He considered that any government’s inability, or reluctance, to regulate economic life and thereby limit profane desires, exacerbated social fragmentation through encouraging an unconstrained, and ultimately self-destructive, individualistic pursuit of self-interest that engendered anomie. Therefore there was a need for an organic form of moral discipline that promoted co-operation based upon reciprocal social obligations. So for Durkheim, whilst collective norms can prevent the emergence of anomie they can also fuel it by encouraging, rather than constraining, the egoist desires he thought to be embedded in the individual consciousness. This leads us to an important aspect of Durkheim’s philosophical orientation which underpins his conceptualization of anomie and his solution: organic solidarity.

Organic solidarity and the division of labourLukes (1967) argues that underlying Durkheim’s presentation of anomie, and the requirement to curb and regulate human passions and desires, is what amounts to a Hobbesian view of human nature articulated by Durkheim’s concept of homo duplex (see: Durkheim, 1960). Hobbes (1962 [1651]), Lukes observes, assumed that people in their ‘natural state’ are inherently aggressive, ego-istical, hedonistic and greedy. According to Hobbes, driven by these boundless ‘appetites’ or ‘pas-sions’, life before the development of society and its social controls, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’: a ‘war of all against all’. For Hobbes, it was only by forming a compact with the ‘common wealth’ or ‘state’, and accepting sovereign authority, that people could escape this unremitting struggle. Such philosophical assumptions drive definitions and analyses of the ‘problems’ that arise in society as being caused by what amounts to an issue of under-control: a lack of moral integration wherein the insatiable egoistic instincts which lie at the heart of the human condition fail to be repressed.

However, we need to be cautious here. With homo duplex Durkheim does see a constant tension between these egocentric impulses and society’s demand for order: the former’s submission to the constraint of the social morality of the latter (1964: 3). It also would seem that whilst Durkheim locates egoism in the ‘biological (i.e. pre-social) structure of the individual organism’ egoism is regarded as primarily an abnormal product of the social development of modern society (Giddens, 1971: 225). Anomie is thereby presented as historically contingent upon the spread of free-market utilitarian thought and the fragmentation of social relationships caused by the evolving ‘forced’ divi-sion of labour (see: Cladis, 1992: 66–69; Giddens, 1971). Indeed, with industrialization, Durkheim saw that the workplace had become the dominant site of socialization and was thus critical to the production of social cohesion—the danger was that it was outside the moral sphere (1964: 4–5). Durkheim initially thought that the anomic situation he observed was abnormal and transient how-ever he also argued that the possibility of a just social order was undermined by a ‘forced’ division of labour produced where people are prevented ‘from occupying a place in the social framework which is compatible with their faculties’ (Durkheim, 1964: 377). A key cause of this situation was, for Durkheim, the hereditary transmission of wealth and the inequalities it created which prevented the evolution of a division of labour based upon merit (Durkheim, 1964: 378–84).

Durkheim’s remedy for anomie lay in the development of organic solidarity which Durkheim initially thought would naturally evolve and would be supportive of functional specialism and inter-dependence through the development of a collective conscience ‘that left open a part of the indi-vidual’s conscience’ (1964: 131) whilst enshrining justice and equality within its integrative moral




code thereby limiting human egoistic desires (Durkheim, 1964: 368–374). Later, Durkheim (1962) argued that the development of more specialized and restricted tasks, through an increasing division of labour, would exacerbate egoistical inclinations thereby creating an irresolvable tension with the complex mutual interdependencies that division of labour simultaneously created. Basically he sug-gested that egoism, and its philosophical partner, classical liberalism as articulated by Spencer’s utilitarianism, could never form the basis of either a collective morality, or a stable social order. Instead what was required was a moral order which integrated individual pursuit of self-interest so that it did not undermine collective cooperation: ‘a legitimate egoism and a countervailing altruism’ (Pearce, 2001: 155). In this manner Durkheim proposed what Cladis (1992: 2) has described as a ‘communitarian defence of liberalism’ through his articulation of organic solidarity.

For Durkheim, there was the requirement to develop new norms of behaviour, disseminated through ‘occupational groups’, such as professional associations, which had in the past socially integrated individuals and moderated their desires. These groups, he thought, could balance and temper egoism with altruism and thereby confine competitive self-interest within a framework of moral discipline that constrained individual decisions to within the boundaries of common inter-ests. His prescription was therefore a modern equivalent of mediaeval guilds which socialized members into accepting moral obligations as a cornerstone of economic activity and thereby inhibited economic egoism (Durkheim, 1957, 13–17; see also Durkheim, 1960) whilst recogniz-ing the various needs and desires of individuals (1951: 380). As Cladis notes, ‘there is therefore something both liberal and communitarian about occupational groups’ (1992: 77). So whilst occu-pational groups would have to give their allegiance to the nation, internally they would have to manage their affairs democratically through ‘elected assemblies’ (Durkheim, 1964: 25–29). Thus Durkheim envisioned that in order to combat anomie and develop organic solidarity, society and its institutions would have to be reorganized through the evolution of collective forms of owner-ship where ‘those employing others will no longer be private owners of capital but...representa-tives of the (democratically controlled) enterprises’ (Pearce, 2001: 82; see also Bellah, 1973: xxxi). Although Durkheim acknowledged that the emergent ‘espirit corporatif’ could become as restrictive as the former ‘conscience collective’, he considered this to be unlikely since factors that undermined the latter also impacted on the former and thus left room for individual differ-ences (Durkheim, 1964: 289–290).

The resultant organic solidarity, expressed as a non-repressive socially constituted collective morality that embraced everyone, would serve to contain the ever present threat of anomie through promoting social cohesion: but it required two further key conditions. First a ‘spontaneous’, ‘unforced’ division of labour (Durkheim, 1964: 376) where ‘particular’ interests are subordinated to ‘general’ interests (ibid., 14) and where meritocracy prevailed (Durkheim, 1964: 377–378). Secondly, this had to be a morality that was ‘freely willed, that is freely accepted, and this free acceptance is nothing less than enlightened acceptance’ (Durkheim, 1961: 120).

Durkheim and contemporary communitarianismDurkheim’s agenda for tempering egoism with altruism through the evolution of organic solidarity is, to a degree, reflected in Etzioni’s recent critique of the erosion of community due to the primacy accorded to self-interest and individualization that has been driven by unregulated free-market capitalism in the United States. For Etzioni, there has been an intrusion of the marketplace into social domains previously governed by a sense of community, based upon the operation of recipro-cal social attachments, which has exacerbated anomie (e.g. Etzioni, 1984, 1988, 1995). Clearly Etzioni does not follow the type of communitarian solution to contemporary ‘moral fragmentation’




put forward by MacIntyre (1984: 224–225), for instance, that presents an ideal of ‘local forms of community’ integrated by shared means and ends wherein people conform to socially prescribed roles in a manner reminiscent of Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity. As with Durkheim, such a solution is dismissed by Etzioni as inappropriate to pluralistic, industrialized, societies with com-plex divisions of labour.

Instead, Etzioni’s solution to anomie (e.g. Etzioni, 1996a: 158) emphasizes the need to balance individual rights, autonomy and freedom with the establishment and maintenance of ‘the spirit of community’ with an emphasis upon social responsibility and mutual obligations as well as active involvement in public affairs both in the civic and work place arenas (Etzioni, 1995: 244). As with Durkheim’s concept of organic solidarity, the aim is to create a balance between what Etzioni describes as individuals’ centrifugal inclinations that undermine social order and communities’ centripetal tendencies that undermine autonomy. In his search for this balance Etzioni produces a communitarian defence of liberalism that parallels much of Durkheim’s position. His ideal is that such a balance should produce ‘authentic communities’ (Etzioni, 1996a: 157–158; Etzionio 1996b:1–6) and avoid what he describes as the stark alternatives of ‘social anarchy or collectivism’ if either the need for order or the need for individual autonomy gains the upper hand (Etzioni, 1996b: 10). In other words, Etzioni’s ‘moderate’ (1996a), ‘new’ or ‘responsive’ communitarianism (1998: xxv) attempts to balance community-based social responsibilities with the rights of the individual. Thereby he avoids the criticisms of communitarianism levelled by libertarians (a clas-sification for Etzioni which embraces both classical liberals and contemporary liberals), regarding its apparent sacrifice of individual liberties and rights for the sake of collectivism, whilst avoiding the libertarian’s tendency ‘to ignore’ social definitions of the common good by reducing commu-nity to ‘an aggregation of individuals joined for their convenience’ (Etzioni, 1996a: 156) thereby exacerbating the problem of anomie. For Etzioni, the main difference here is that the responsive communitarian ‘grants more weight to the common good and relies first and foremost on the moral culture rather than on the market, on persuasion rather than on financial incentives’ (Etzioni, 2003: 13). At the heart of this communitarian position is the idea of reciprocity—‘each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its mem-bers’ (Etzioni, 1998: xxxiv).

In his notion of an authentic community responsive to members’ needs that balances indi-vidual autonomy with a moral order that emphasizes protection without the oppression of an imposed order (e.g. Etzioni, 1996b: 1–2) a clear parallel is further evident with Durkheim’s organic solidarity. For Etzioni, the cultural values that underpin such a moral order and concep-tions of the common good ‘must’ be the product of what he calls ‘moral dialogue’ (Etzioni, 1997: 85–159; Etzioni, 2003: 7–13)—social processes based upon discussion, persuasion and consent as well as intensive reflexive debate of the values of those engaged in the dialogue. However, what seems to be missing from Etzioni’s analysis is that aspect of Durkheim’s critique of patho-logical forms of the division of labour located in employee powerlessness and exploitation (Durkheim, 1964: 376) and his view that in order for an unforced division of labour to be pos-sible, meritocracy must prevail. As we have already noted, for merit to prevail in the division of labour Durkheim argued for the abolition of inherited wealth due to the advantages it created for beneficiaries that were ‘not necessarily in keeping with their personal worth’ (Durkheim, 1964: 378). Thus it would seem that intimately tied to Durkheim’s communitarian defence of liberal-ism is also a radical agenda for social and institutional change in order to promote the conditions necessary for the development of organic solidarity. However, the contemporary deployment of the concept of anomie in the workplace is the product of other influences very distant from the communitarian agendas of either Durkheim or Etzioni.




The (re)formulation of anomie Orru (1987: 118–119) argues that Durkheim’s original European formulation of the concept of anomie was modified by certain intellectuals based upon what they perceived as established, socially prescribed, ends of North American Society. The result was a switch from an explanatory focus that was concerned with a normlessness of both ends and means to one concerned exclu-sively with a normlessness of means (see also: Besnard, 1988; Cladis, 1992; Mestrovic, 1991). Here it is important to note that Durkheim was writing at a time when French society was undergo-ing significant change with the development of industrialization and a market economy. In con-trast, Merton, for instance, in a widely cited article (1938; see also Merton, 1957, 1964, 1966), was writing at a time when those emergent forces observed by Durkheim had already been largely institutionalized in the USA. Merton was also highly influenced by Parsons in whose work anomie, and the Hobbesian problem of order, played a pivotal role. Parsons (1937) saw that social order was only possible through the existence of regulative norms and that anomie was the antithesis of, or complete breakdown of, that normative order. In this functionalist theoretical context, Merton was concerned to try to understand how non-biological conditions determine how biologically derived impulses may escape restraint and thereby explain how the incidence of deviant behaviour varies in different social contexts.

Merton defined anomie in terms of a relative degree of normlessness regarding the means by which commonly held ‘culturally induced success goal[s]’ (Merton, 1938: 676), articulated by a ‘shared system of success symbols’ (Merton, 1938: 681), may be achieved. For Merton, society had already, deterministically, mapped out ‘what was worth striving for’ (Merton, 1957: 187). Here his emphasis is upon anomie as ‘cultural malintegration’ (Merton, 1938: 673; Merton, 1957: 134) where normative rules and procedures governing the attainment of culturally approved goals ‘have lost their savor and force’ (Merton, 1964: 226). Accordingly, a lack of coordination between ‘means-and-goals phases of social structure’ may result in a situation where ‘predictability virtu-ally disappears and what might be properly termed cultural chaos or anomie intervenes’ (Merton, 1938: 682).

Merton associated numerous forms of social pathology and deviancy with a failure to provide, and enforce, agreed means for achieving those goals: ‘… aberrant conduct, therefore, may be viewed as a symptom of dissociation between culturally defined aspirations and socially structured means’ (Merton, 1938: 674). Indeed such a situation is exacerbated in a society where ‘a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else certain common symbols of success … [but] … its social structure rigorously restricts or completely eliminates access to approved modes of acquir-ing these symbols for a considerable part of the population’ (Merton, 1938: 680, emphasis in origi-nal). In these conditions, the individual feels ‘strain’, or ‘anomia’, (Merton, 1964: 225) but it raises questions regarding the nature of those culturally defined aspirations which are frustrated.

For several scholars (e.g. Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994: 6; Orru, 1987: 118–119; Passas, 1995: 93–96), Merton’s analysis accepts the aspirations articulated in the American Dream as cultural givens, but because of attenuated social control a performative issue arises: some pursue it in an anomic fashion (Merton, 1966: 819–20). Messner and Rosenfeld (1994: 6) define the American Dream as ‘a broad cultural ethos that entails a commitment to the goal of material success, to be pursued by everyone in society, under conditions of open, individual competition’. In other words, the traditional values of the American Dream articulate Durkheim’s philosophical bête noire: clas-sical liberalism and utilitarianism. For instance, American society, it is assumed, offers opportuni-ties for upward social mobility for those rugged, egoistical, free agents who are prepared to embrace a strong work ethic and seize opportunities made available by a free market that simultaneously




ensures maximum efficiency because its hidden hand operates to reward the toughest and most meritorious who succeed by dint of their own self-interested efforts (see Perrucci and Wysong, 2008). Some commentators (e.g. Ryan et al., 1999) argue that whilst belief in such a dream fosters a commodification of self, and an over investment in insatiable material goals, it is not specifically American but rather the result of liberal market economy ideology (see also Messner and Rosenfeld, 1997). However, Merton did not see the goals articulated by this ethos as being a source of anomie in their own right. Rather anomie becomes a problem associated with weak normative constraint over the choice of means of achievement of such culturally approved symbols and in particular, with certain sections of society: those excluded from access and the culturally mal-integrated, become the exclusive focus of performative concern (see Merton, 1957: 157). Here Merton argues that the solution to such problems lies with ‘technical specialists’ who must alert people to, and provide solutions to, ‘conditions of social disorganization that in principle can be brought under control’ (Merton, 1966: 799).

Anomie and management theoryIn the field of management, it was Elton Mayo (1919, 1933, 1949), an Australian who spent much of his academic life in the USA, who first overtly deployed anomie as a theoretical device. But as with Merton, he used it in a manner that naturalized the status quo. For instance, Mayo’s work drew attention to the role of emotions and sentiments in the regulation of workers’ behaviour by arguing that human co-operation at work had always relied upon the evolution of a ‘non-logical social code’. This idea is directly related to his critique of Ricardo (Mayo, 1949: 31–50) where he accepts much of the latter’s Hobbesian stance but rejects his view of ‘natural’ society as consisting of a horde of unorganized individuals acting in a manner rationally calculated to secure self-interest. Instead Mayo drew upon Pareto to present the individual worker as pursuing self-interest but in a non-logical manner. In doing so, he also purports a major intellectual debt to Durkheim (e.g. 1949: 5–14) and repeatedly draws upon a version of anomie theory in other work (e.g. Mayo, 1933: 129–139; 166). But it is unclear as to where, when and how Mayo was exposed to Durkheim’s theory of anomie. Indeed as Dingley (1997) points out, except for the Division of Labour (first translated in 1933) and Elementry Forms of Religious Life (first translated in 1915) most of Durkheim’s work, save for several minor pamphlets, had not been translated until after Mayo had completed his major works. Indeed Mayo only directly refers to Durkheim’s Suicide (1933, 1949) which was not translated until 1951. Therefore, as Dingley argues, it is hardly surprising that Mayo (who only had a rudimentary grasp of French) misunderstood Durkheim ‘reducing his ideas to some form of social engineering’ (Dingley, 1997: 1121) through the lens of the Hobbesian problem of order. In the hands of Mayo, anomie is reconstituted as a technical problem circulating around the maladjusted worker that could be resolved through more effective regulation of the means by which indisputable organizational goals may be achieved: a theoretical redirection that shares key elements of Merton’s technicist reformulation of Durkheim.

Like Merton, Mayo selectively deploys elements of Durkheim’s work to point to how industrial development had destroyed ‘effective routines of collaboration to which … the survival of histori-cal societies has always been due’ (Mayo, 1949: 8). He suggested that what Durkheim classified as the traditional mechanism of social order, a non-logical social code based upon shared values which bestowed order upon employees, had disintegrated under the pressures generated by social and technological change. However, despite his fears regarding what he described as ‘a condition of perilous instability’ (Mayo, 1919: 41), Mayo overtly rejected a Hobbesian prescription of an authoritarian state and instead emphasized the requirement to develop cooperation based upon




‘direct investigation of the facts’ (Mayo, 1919: 49) together with ‘active development of social skill and insight’ (Mayo, 1919: 50).

For Mayo ‘collaboration in an industrial society cannot be left to chance’ (Mayo, 1949: 8), yet he observed that there were no effective administrative methods aimed ‘at the maintenance of cooperation’ (Mayo, 1949: 9). Again Mayo drew upon Pareto who had argued that ruling elites, because of their superior knowledge and skills, should provide rational direction to others. Hence Mayo translated the Hobbesian nightmare into a managerial problem of how to forestall the unleashing ‘of man’s fundamental rottenness’ (Mayo, 1919: 41) that he assumed fed the develop-ment of employee behaviours that were inimical to the exercise of legitimate prerogative by a newly emergent meritocracy: management. By default, the goals and means set for organizations by senior managers were privileged. Hence, like Merton, Mayo relocated the problem of anomie exclusively to a specific section of society: refractory, mal-socialized employees. Expert managers were presented as needing to socially engineer workers’ compliance with policies and decisions that articulate and regulate the pursuit of what are assumed to be societies’ socially approved and sanctioned utilitarian goals. Thus Mayo argued that it was possible for management, whom he presumed to be exempt from anomic pressures, to performatively reintegrate the irrational employee ‘who had no understanding of his real needs (sic)’ (Mayo, 1933: 183).

As we indicate above, Mayo and Merton’s commensurable reformulations demonstrate a major break with the work of Durkheim for they take as given the very goals and values that Durkheim saw as a primary source of anomie: the institutionalization of self-interest in the guise of utilitarian-ism. In a sense the American Dream is uncritically preserved and escapes theoretical attention—it is the performative issue of how it is pursued in practice that becomes the focus of analytical con-cern. Thus Mayo equated his rendition of the problem of anomie with the re-establishment of socially cohesive collectives in the work place that exhibited what amounted to Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity in order to secure the normative specification of means whilst leaving the American Dream unquestioned and the material conditions of work unaltered.

Interestingly, Mayo’s analysis posed the problem of what the most appropriate cultural source of social cohesiveness should be in the work place. Here Mayo dismisses some potential sources of work place social cohesiveness, put forward by Durkheim, such as collective ownership and work place democracy, as threats that would propagate ‘collective mediocrity’ (Mayo, 1919: 57). Instead, the preservation and enhancement of management prerogative was the key for Mayo in that ‘in all matters … the widest knowledge and the highest skill should be sovereign’ (Mayo, 1919: 59). By this deft ploy, managers themselves are effectively excluded from any role in the propagation of anomie. Instead, as with Merton’s ‘technical specialists’, they are (re)presented as performative saviours. Therefore a key requirement for managers was the ability to manipulate employees’ non-logical sentiments in a manner commensurable with the ‘desire and capacity to work better with management’ (Mayo, 1949: 74–75) through the development of communication and interpersonal skills, such as leadership and counselling. As O’Connor (1999a: 228–229) argues, the lens deployed by Mayo in his project also incorporates elements of Machiavelli and Freud. For instance he imported counselling techniques from psychotherapy that could be used by managers to manipulate workers and treat fatigue, low productivity, ‘revery’ and conflict through unburdening employees of their primitive neuroses unleashed by their failure to adapt to industrial life and morally linking them to managerial goals without them realizing it. As she observes, through this ‘science’, Mayo ‘transformed Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Machiavelli’s Prince, into the modern-day manager. This transformation gave management the moral legitimation it needed to accompany material success. Now the manager would become the guardian of social order and Western civilization itself, for it would save humanity from its naturally dire state’ (O’Connor, 1999a: 229).




Contemporary culture management manoeuvres Although there are striking parallels in Merton and Mayo’s theoretical reformulations of anomie, these developments seem to have occurred independently of one another but in the shared cultural context and intellectual milieu of North America where the emergent social and economic changes criticized by Durkheim had been already institutionalized. In their hands Durkheim’s theory and his prescribed antidote were radically transformed. As Orru broadly observes, the culturally sanctioned goals of the American Dream ‘... have been implicitly adhered to by American sociology’ ... with the simultaneous ... ‘abandonment of the European sociological tradition of “Grand Theory” which sketches the blueprint of a utopian society in favour of a piecemeal social engineering which looks for technical improvements in an otherwise sound social structure’ (Orru, 1987: 119, emphasis added). The result is that whereas for Durkheim anomie affected the whole of society, Merton’s and Mayo’s (re)presentations identify anomie as afflicting and creating what are classified as deviant subcultures which have to be culturally re-engineered and re-integrated by expert elites. As we have already argued, Mayo’s solution to anomie focussed upon management’s regulation of the non-logi-cal impulses embedded in ‘socio-emotional codes’ informally generated by groups of employees. His approach was virtually institutionalized by the subsequent development of the Human Relations Movement which embraced the idea that management could become the manipulators of social har-mony in the workplace without making significant changes to extant bureaucratic infrastructures (see Barley and Kunda, 1992; O’Connor, 1999a, 1999b). It is this theoretical reformulation of anomie that has had a significant influence upon contemporary culture management manoeuvres. Today these prescriptions are often couched in an anti-bureaucratic discourse that proffers culture management as a remedial device for what is tacitly conceived as a new Hobbesian problem of order. Moreover, as we shall argue below, this discourse articulates and is guided by a neoliberal agenda reflected in the content of culture management manoeuvres and in attempts at exposing employees to the operations of market forces facilitated by dismantling vertically integrated bureaucracies: processes that in Durkheim’s terms would ironically exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, anomie.

One broad theme in the management and organizational literature of the last 20 or so years is that contemporary work organizations are, or should be, evolving into something quite different from their bureaucratic heritage: post-bureaucratic, unbundled and marketized, flexible, high performance forms of organization and management (e.g. Applebaum et al, 2000; Hastings, 1993; Hecksher, 1994; Hendry, 2006; Josserand et al. 2006; Osbourne and Plastric, 1998; Peters, 1992; Volberda, 1998). Resonating with Durkheim’s and Mayo’s concerns about the disruption caused by rapid social and technological change, management theorists often present these new organizational forms as a neces-sary response to an unstable socio-historical configuration—‘fast capitalism’.

The theoretical argument here revolves around the notion that because increasing levels of uncertainty and change in organizational environments have made the world less comprehensible, knowledge and information are no longer hierarchically ordered and distributed in contemporary organizations. Indeed organisations are being pushed towards new designs, usually at the expense of vertically integrated bureaucracies, as managers try to cope with what is classified as dramatic, unavoidable, accelerating, irreversible, discontinuous change (e.g. Castells, 2000a, 2000b, 2004; Davis and Meyer, 1998; Drucker, 1999; Laffin, 1998; Rifkind, 2000). As a result of their top-down mode of command and control, bureaucracies are presented as sclerotic, and incapable of dealing with current demands for innovation and change (e.g. Beinhocker, 2006; Heckscher, 1994; Osbourne and Graebler, 1992; Quinn, 1992). Simultaneously, as Kunda and Ailon-Souday (2005: 205) observe, there has been a perceived need to open organizations to the discipline provided by the logic of the free market: something that is, in part, accomplished by devolving some managerial tasks ‘to those closest to the market—the employees doing the actual work’. As a result of these




pressures many organisations are said to now rely upon autonomous, educated, employees who are empowered to use their intuition, discretion and often superior local knowledge to creatively deal with unpredictable production and service demands whilst improving customer service and value, rather than being merely compliant with routinized repertoires or dependent upon the direct super-visory commands of managers (e.g. Adler, 2001; Applebaum et al., 2000; Burnes, 2005; Kalleberg, 2003; Stark, 2001; Volberda, 1998; Wood, 1999).

Often these organizational developments have been presented as liberating the employee from the oppressive and patriarchal constraints of the no longer viable bureaucratic form (e.g. Kanter, 1989a, 1989b; Peters, 1992). However, although the idiom is different, underlying this image is a prevailing concern with a new Hobbesian problem of order and a search for alternative means of establishing control over employees to that provided by the apparently defunct bureaucracy. The guiding presumption appears to be derived from Merton and Mayo: that as bureaucratic control fails management must somehow retain performative control over how (naturalized) goals are achieved in times of heightened uncertainty—the threat of anomie is, by default, associated exclu-sively with means.

For example, employee empowerment is usually defined in terms of management ceding to employees the capacity to determine certain aspects of their work (Englehard and Simmons, 2002; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997; Wilkinson, 1998) whilst enabling senior managers to retain overall control. It is therefore aimed at engendering employees’ ‘directed’ (Waterman, 1988) autonomous self-management anchored in a sense of purpose and direction often provided by the systematic dissemination of an entrepreneurial ethic, propagated by senior management in relation to their strategic goals (see: Simons, 1995). Thus the extension and reconfiguration of employees’ roles is restricted to their local involvement in deciding the means by which such ends may be more effec-tively pursued.

However, according to some commentators (e.g. Applebaum et al., 1999; Mills and Ungson, 2003; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997) cascading power down the organization creates the need to rec-oncile a possible loss of management control with the requirement for integration of a loosely coupled system. The widely proposed solution to this perceived problem articulates Mayo’s rem-edies for anomie and Merton’s concerns about cultural mal-integration: a shift to less obtrusive culturally-based, normative, ideational, or clan, forms of control. In this fashion, the control- consent dilemma is notionally resolved through reconstructing employees’ subjectivity in-line with management’s requirements (see Elemes and Smith, 2001; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Knights and McCabe, 2001; Maravelias, 2003).

Whilst cultural forms of control may be deployed alongside bureaucratic modalities (see Hales, 2002), it is the high level of reliance upon culture management as a mode of control that is usually presented as one of the distinguishing characteristics of post-bureaucratic, high performance developments. Culture management may be attempted by pre-emptively controlling the attitudi-nal and behavioural characteristics of new organizational members (Brannan and Hawkins, 2007; Hardy and Lieba-O’Sullivan, 1998; Townley, 1994), or by management attempting to influence the value premises of existing members’ behaviour through trying to restructure their attitudes and beliefs (see Du Gay, 2000; Hope and Hendry, 1995; Legge, 1995; Willmott, 2003; Wood, 1989), through the use of an array of related Human Resource Management practices. The resul-tant normative control is based upon establishing ‘intense emotional attachment and the internal-ization of clearly enunciated company values’ (Kunda, 1992:10). As Barker (1993, 1999) has observed, once employee cultural defences are broken down, informal peer group pressure upon the individual member is redirected and begins to marshal management approved norms. A pos-sible result is ‘an overcoming of the division between the ‘personal life’, values and beliefs of




employees and the impersonal demands of corporations for greater productivity and quality’ (Willmott, 1993: 523). Where this strategy is effective, the means by which employees constitute their own identities is merged with how they exercise self-regulation and as Miller and Rose (1990: 26) suggest ‘the “autonomous” subjectivity of the productive individual … [becomes] … a central economic resource’. So, as with Mayo’s original prescriptions, the claim is that if the appropriate values and attitudes are internalized by the maladjusted worker through manage-ment’s cultural interventions, a common sense of purpose and moral involvement, activated through emotion and sentiment, develops which ensures that employee subjectivities become a resource available for the pursuit of a priori corporate goals.

Culture management and neoliberalism: towards a Durkheimian critiqueIn recent years several scholars have pointed to the ambiguous relationship between Durkheim’s concerns regarding anomie and contemporary culture-management solutions. For instance Ray (1986) and Dahler-Larsen (1994) both point to the authoritarian and technicist implications. Indeed Dahler-Larsen notes how proponents of culture management share with Durkheim a concern over moral disorder. However their top-down attempts at homogenization as a strategic source of com-petitive advantage and profitability would be construed by Durkheim as an attempt to ‘use the sacred for profane purposes’ (Dahler-Larsen, 1994: 8) as the underlying utilitarian ethos under-mines social solidarity and destroys the possibility of Durkheim’s solution to anomie that was located in a consensually determined morality. Although neither Ray nor Dahler-Larsen mention Merton, and only attend to Mayo very briefly, it would seem that their characterization of this managerial literature demonstrates its theoretical dependence upon that particular North American reformulation of anomie rather than that of Durkheim’s original conceptualization. Starkey (1998) adds to this debate by pointing to how Dahler-Larsen’s critique of homogenization is mistaken as it ignores a key current within the corporate culture literature which emphasizes the need for cor-porate cultures to promote learning and critical reflection rather than ideological control. Clearly Starkey has an important point here but it could be interpreted as implying that some corporate culture theorists may be more orientated towards Durkheim than the Mertonian-Mayoite majority. However, even those writers whom he suggests conceive of culture as necessarily heterogeneous (e.g. Senge, 1990) seem to be primarily concerned with means rather than goals and do not chal-lenge the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism expressed as a post-bureaucratic market rational-ism (Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005), or market populism, that parallels the late nineteenth century laissez-faire classical liberalism.

For example, Hendry (2001) points to how in certain key respects bureaucracies operated as hier-archies, based to a degree upon reciprocal social obligations between members and moral constraint, that protected many internal organizational processes from the operation of market forces (see also Du Gay, 2000, 2005) and thereby created a bulwark against anomie. However, recent moves in orga-nizational governance are characterized by ‘relationships between firms and their employees, and relationships between employees, … governed quite openly, by rules of the market rather than those of traditional obligation’ (Hendry, 2001: 213). There seems to be two interrelated aspects to these developments: first the content of the culture management process and, second, the unbundling of vertically integrated bureaucracies through the marketization of employment relations.

It is evident that culture management initiatives are often guided by the intention of subjugating social relations to the values and principles of neoliberalism thereby subordinating what Durkheim would see as reciprocal moral obligations to free market mechanisms. For example it has been argued (e.g. Du Gay, 1996; 2000; Du Gay and Salaman, 1992; Needham, 2003) that at the heart of




many culture-management manoeuvres is an attempt to inscribe employees with the material ethos, logic and demands of free market enterprise: a commodification of labour which blurs the distinc-tion between the identities of consumers and employees so that both are now constituted as autono-mous, self-reliant, calculating individuals seeking to egoistically maximize their worth through acts of rational choice in a market-based world. Such individualized performative processes express, and are exacerbated by, what Polanyi (1957) originally described as the increasingly dis-embedded nature of the market economy, especially in Anglophone countries, where its operation is left unchecked by non-economic institutions (see also Harvey, 2005). Whilst governments func-tion to facilitate the operation of the free market, this neoliberal agenda has simultaneously pene-trated and begun to dominate other institutional domains, including the public sector (Armbruster, 2005; Foster and Wilding, 2000; Hood, 1999; Newman, 1998), thereby suppressing the ethical and moral foundations of public service (Hoggett, 2005).

The processes by which this neoliberal market logic has colonized various public and private sector institutional domains by subjugating their traditional norms to the value orientations of market principles has been widely documented (e.g. Etzioni, 1995; Kalleberg, 2009; Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994; Oakes et al., 1998; Salaman, 2005). In Durkheim’s terms, this utilitarian achievement-orientated ethos articulates an exaggerated emphasis upon the goal of material success often in the context of ever-receding goals of continuous improvement (see Langbert, 2002) which fail to provide normative limits for those ends: an anomic ethic that drives people to aspire to goals that can never be accomplished regardless of their capabilities. Indeed it provides a virtuous moral distinction to such ‘longing for infinity’ (Durkheim, 1951: 257). Simultaneously, as Kalleberg observes (2009), with the advent of a market-based employment relationship, employees are left unprotected from, and subject to the discipline of, market forces. Here the rules of the market have reduced job security, increased inequality, promoted anomie, and created the expectation that man-agement and employees must act as competitive free-agents who are often required to precariously pursue their careers in multiple organizational sites selling their portfolios of skills to the highest bidder (see also Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Barley and Kunda, 2004; Cappelli, 1999; Sennett, 1998, 2006). Indeed with the ostensible demise of vertically integrated bureaucracies, marketiza-tion has encouraged an ideological shift that centres upon competitive individualism and empha-sizes how everyone must be a rugged entrepreneur who takes personal responsibility for solving their own problems with rewards apportioned by the hidden hand according to merit.

Thus the ethos propagated by culture management manoeuvres in order to combat an assumed Hobbesian problem of order often tacitly deploys a theory of anomie derived from Merton and Mayo’s performative means-ends calculus, which accepts the free market logic of neoliberalism as a given. Paradoxically, such an approach theoretically expresses and serves to propagate the inci-dence of anomie in Durkheim’s terms through engendering an unfettering of egoism that under-mines social solidarity. Indeed developments seem to have provided a new social legitimacy for the individual pursuit of economic self-interest (Wilde, 2007). In this vein, Mangham (2005) has observed that the resultant unbridled capitalism has accorded an unfettered egoism with a level of social legitimacy that it has never previously achieved. In the mainstream management literature, rarely are the market values of individual competition and material success questioned as being problematic ends-in-themselves. Rather, through a Mertonian–Mayoite lens, they are presented as becoming so only because of a lack of normative specification of the means of their achievement. In other words, the concern is only with the operation of given social arrangements whereas Durkheim focused upon the social arrangements themselves in comparison to alternative possibilities. Paradoxically, as Kunda and Ailon-Souday (2005: 211) have observed with regard to the Enron scandal, the emphasis upon the neoliberal goals of efficiency and the meritocratic distribution of




material abundance under conditions of individual competition, could actually serve to de-emphasize the importance of the ways in which these goals are pursued.

Conclusions The theories of anomie reviewed in this article provide rival conceptual frameworks for under-standing the relationship between the social values held by actors and the means and ends of their behaviour in workplace settings. Here we have tried to highlight the influence of the Mertonian-Mayoite anomie theory: how it seems to operate as a hidden hand behind much theorizing about contemporary work organizations and the ways that it is entrenched in, and maintained by, natural-ized representational practices that have enabled it to remain largely closed off from critical inspec-tion and thereby all the more powerful.

We have argued that Merton and Mayo’s deployment of anomie (re)presents the phenomena as a ‘problem’ of cultural deficit located exclusively with lower level organizational participants who may be refractory due to mal-socialization. Such a stance articulates a functionalist problematic of cultural mal-integration and organizational deviance that may be ameliorated through the legitimate exercise of performative control by more rational and knowledgeable hierarchical superiors over subordinates. A result has been the encouragement of silence regarding the culturally sanctioned goals that constitute the status quo: a veritable moral muteness lurking behind a problematic that is instrumentally concerned with control over how those incorrigible ends may be best pursued.

In contrast, as we have argued, Durkheim conceptualized the collective disorganization or derangement he called anomie as a historically contingent social product: an endemic problem, applying to everyone regardless of their social standing, which was expressed in two related ways. Firstly, it was expressed through the failure of the collective consciousness to regulate both the nature of human aspirations and the means by which they should be pursued. Secondly, it was expressed through the spread of specific norms which actively inflamed unregulated aspi-rations: an unfettering of egoism which was caused by the spread of free-market economic thought and practice.

In other words, the very goals and values taken as performative givens by Merton and Mayo, as well as by much current management theory, are presented as a key cause of anomie by Durkheim. As we have argued, the spread of free-market thought and practices is illustrated by the content and process of recent post-bureaucratic cultural interventions and the delegitimation of alternative values and goals, such as those articulated by non-business orientated professionals (see e.g. Oakes et al., 1998). Here the theoretical influence of Merton and Mayo’s interpretations of anomie serve to naturalize what Durkheim would see as anomic conditions created by the contemporary framing of institutional behaviour through a neoliberal revival of 19th century economic liberalism wherein the self-regulating market has become reified, privileged and legitimized as the necessary arbiter of that behaviour.

Thus for Durkheim, a key concern about contemporary society would be the disembedded nature of contemporary economies and the penetration of self-regulated market logic into other institutional arenas thereby ‘subordinating other social organs to itself’ (1951: 255) and failing to provide normative limits upon the pursuit of unattainable goals (Durkheim, 1951: 248). In particu-lar, Durkheim’s theory of anomie would encourage a focus upon the operation of neoliberalism in the workplace and how it serves to ‘instil a culture of individualistic market-orientated behaviour in people of all social classes’ (Cerny, 2008: 10). In a sense, tacitly guided by American Dreams and Hobbesian nightmares, recent culture management manoeuvres have served to sanctify Durkheim’s profane.




Durkheim’s proposed solution to the problem of anomie, the reflexive and dialogical development of an organic solidarity as a non-repressive socially constituted collective morality that balanced egoism with altruism, that to a degree enshrined democratic values, parallels contemporary ‘responsive’ communitarian defences of liberalism as, for instance articulated by Etzioni. The latter, as we have noted, attempts to seek a solution to anomie in a balance between dialogically derived, community-based, social responsibilities and individual rights wherein the agreed common good takes precedence (e.g. Etzioni, 1998, 2003). This pro-gramme thereby also articulates Durkheim’s view that organic solidarity had to be based upon a morality that was freely willed and accepted by enlightened individuals (1961: 120). For Durkheim, the means for the development of organic solidarity lay with occupational groups, organized by the workers themselves, who he hoped would propagate ‘the rights and duties common to all men (sic)’ (Durkheim, 1951: 380) and also agree moral traditions and practices specific to ‘the qualities peculiar to each occupation’ (Durkheim, 1951). So as with Etzioni’s ‘spirit of the community’, Durkheim saw the possibility of an array of moral traditions, demo-cratically developed by enlightened members to temper egoism with altruism, which increased as the complexity of the division of labour developed. However, Durkheim’s own communi-tarian defence of liberalism seems to go farther in the sense he also saw that in order to create a spontaneous, unforced, division of labour (which he deemed a necessary condition for organic solidarity) a meritocracy must prevail—something which in turn required the prior abolition of inherited wealth because of the unfair advantages it bestowed upon recipients (1964: 376–378). In a sense, therefore, Durkheim seems to emphasize the communitarian more than the liberal in his defence of the latter.

In sum, Durkheim’s theory of anomie would dismiss Merton and Mayo’s technocratic con-cern exclusively with means as it serves to naturalize, by default, particular ends and priorities. Application of Durkheim’s theory of anomie encourages critical reflection upon the nature of the goals which are taken-for-granted by much mainstream management discourse, how they are socially produced and maintained, and their impact upon the disadvantaged and disenfran-chised. Here, a key concern would be the nature and desirability of those ends, which by default are often presented as incorrigible givens to create an aura of technical neutrality to the means-related cultural fixes that are often used to manage contemporary organizations. Simultaneously it sanctions a programme of institutional change that directly challenges the current popularity of organizational practices that articulate neoliberal agendas and the promotion of a disembed-ded market economy. Unfortunately, much of Durkheim’s potential contribution has not been acknowledged or explored in much contemporary work that is critical of the status quo as this has tended to look to other classical scholars, such as Marx or Weber, for inspiration. The irony regarding Durkheim’s presentation of his theory of anomie is that he has been often categorized as a ‘sociologist of ‘order’ and ‘regulation’ par excellence’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 46, emphasis in original): a ‘conservative’ (Coser, 1964: 211). Here we have tried to show how whilst such an epitaph may be appropriate for either Merton or Mayo, it would seem somewhat misguided when it comes to Durkheim himself. Lurking within Durkheim’s considerable oeu-vre there is both a critique of the status quo and an agenda for change relevant to contemporary social relations within the workplace. In this article we have tried to reappraise Durkheim’s work by illustrating how his focus on ends as well as means, his critique of utilitarianism, and his particular communitarian stance are core elements of his theory of anomie. The result is an important critique of the effects of neoliberalism upon contemporary workplace arrangements which proffers organic solidarity as an alternative agenda for organizational change aimed at engendering greater social cohesiveness.




AcknowledgementWe would like to thank Martin Parker and the 4 anonymous reviewers for their incisive feedback and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Biographies

Phil Johnson is Professor of Organization Studies at Sheffield University Management School. He has published in variety of books and articles in the areas of research methodlogy, epistemol-ogy, organization theory and business ethics. His current research interests include new organi-zational forms, hierarchism and democratic modes of organization. Address: Management School, University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 4DT, UK. Email [email protected]




Joanne Duberley is a Reader in Organization Studies at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her recent research interests focus upon the study of careers in a wide variety of settings including academic scientists, self employed women and NHS managers. Jo also main-tains an interest in research methodology and the philosophical underpinnings of management research. She has published her work in a wide range of national and international journals. Address: The Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email [email protected]



Anomie and culture management: reappraising Durkheim

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