MARKETIZED MENTALITY, COMPETITIVE/EGOISTIC SCHOOL CULTURE, AND DELINQUENT ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR: AN APPLICATION OF INSTITUTIONAL ANOMIE THEORY*

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12173

MARKETIZED MENTALITY, COMPETITIVE/EGOISTIC

SCHOOL CULTURE, AND DELINQUENT ATTITUDES

AND BEHAVIOR: AN APPLICATION

OF INSTITUTIONAL ANOMIE THEORY∗

EVA M. GROß,1ANDREAS H ¨

OVERMANN,1

and STEVEN F. MESSNER2

1Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, University of

Bielefeld, Germany & Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, National

Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation

2Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY

KEYWORDS: institutional anomie theory, school delinquency, marketized mentality,

communal school organization, multilevel modeling, situational action theory

We analyze the individual-level and school-level determinants of delinquency

through the lens of a macro-sociological theory of crime—institutional anomie the-

ory (IAT). The concept of a “marketized mentality” is introduced as a predictor of

students’ delinquency, along with an egoistic/competitive school culture—a feature of

the school community. Five hypotheses pertaining to the readiness to use violence and

self-reported delinquency were assessed using multilevel modeling with data from a

survey in Germany for 4,150 students clustered in 69 schools. The results largely meet

theoretical expectations. The measure of marketized mentality exhibits robust relation-

ships with both forms of delinquency at the individual level, and an egoistic/competitive

school culture helps explain variation in levels of these forms of delinquency across

schools. Also consistent with expectations, the anti-social effects of marketized mental-

ity are accentuated for both the readiness to use violence and committing instrumentally

motivated property offenses as a competitive/egoistic school climate increases. The re-

sults of our analyses reveal that bringing in concepts of IAT can appreciably enhance

understanding of the characteristics of students and features of communal school or-

ganization that are conducive to youthful offending.

Schools are fundamental social institutions in contemporary societies. Thus, it is not

surprising that criminologists have devoted considerable attention to the nature of any

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2018.56.issue-2/issuetoc.

The data for this article were collected in the context of the project Adolescent multiple offend-

ers. Social backgrounds of repeated violent behavior: Possible prognosis, funded by Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation; HE 1385/17 – 1, ABOJ 580850)

and linked to the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at Bielefeld

University in Germany. The preparation of the article was supported and funded by a Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) research fellowship to Andreas

H¨

overmann [HO 5858/1-1].

Direct correspondence to Eva Maria Groß, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict

and Violence, University of Bielefeld, Universitaetsstrasse 25, Bielefeld 33615, Germany (e-mail:

grossmariaeva@gmail.com).

C2018 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12173

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 56 Number 2 333–369 2018 333

334 GROß, H ¨

OVERMANN, & MESSNER

influence of school-related variables on delinquent behavior. As Gottfredson (2001: 2–3)

observed, research in this field has been informed by most of the major etiological per-

spectives on crime and delinquency, including strain theory, Marxist theory, social disor-

ganization theory, social control theory, and routine activities theory. The various studies

in this field have been based on individual-level analyses, school-level analyses, and to a

lesser extent, multilevel analyses. The accumulated evidence has demonstrated that sev-

eral school-related variables are related to delinquency (Stewart, 2003: 575), while reveal-

ing that the role of schools is “complex”—features of the schooling process have the po-

tential to both increase and decrease the likelihood of delinquency (Gottfredson, 2001: 3).

The purpose of the present study is to build on prior research by viewing the complex

influences on delinquency of schools and of the students therein through the lens of insti-

tutional anomie theory (IAT). IAT was originally intended as a quintessentially macro-

level explanation of crime. The primary criminogenic drivers of the theory—economic

dominance in the institutional structure and anomie in the culture—were conceptualized

as properties of large-scale social collectivities. The IAT research program has developed

and evolved considerably over the course of the approximately 25 years since the publica-

tion of its core ideas in the book Crime and the American Dream (Messner and Rosenfeld,

1994). Empirical analyses have assessed hypotheses derived from the theory with data for

cross-national samples (see, e.g., Chamlin and Cochran, 2007; Messner and Rosenfeld,

1997) and with data for territories within nations at varying geographic scales (see, e.g.,

Chamlin and Cochran, 1995; Hannon and DeFronzo, 1998; Piquero and Piquero, 1998;

Schoepfer and Piquero, 2006; Stucky, 2003). In addition, efforts to extract from IAT in-

sights about criminogenic processes at the individual level of analysis have begun to accu-

mulate (Hughes, Schaible, and Gibbs, 2015; Karstedt and Farrall, 2006; Messner, Thome,

and Rosenfeld, 2008; Mufti´

c, 2006).

We draw on IAT to derive hypotheses about the effects on delinquency of conceptual

analogs of the macro-social property of anomie at both the individual level of students and

the organizational level of schools. Our individual-level analog is a social–psychological

orientation that has been conceptualized in prior research as a “marketized mentality”

(MM). Our organizational analog is a companion feature of school culture, which we

conceptualize as a competitive/egoistic culture. Through the use of survey data for a sam-

ple of students attending schools in different regions of Germany, we operationalize these

concepts and assess hypotheses about their effects on indicators of delinquent attitudes

and behavior in multilevel analyses.

PRIOR RESEARCH ON SCHOOL-RELATED PREDICTORS

OF DELINQUENCY

Although researchers in the United States have applied core ideas from a range of

theoretical perspectives to understand the influence of school-related variables on delin-

quency, recently, they have relied heavily on Hirschi’s (1969) social bonding theory (e.g.,

Payne, Gottfredson, and Gottfredson, 2003: 753; Stewart, 2003: 577). According to this

theory, school attachment serves as one of the more salient bonds that links youths to con-

ventional society (see especially Hirschi, 1969: ch. VII). Bonding theory directs attention

primarily to the individual level of analysis. Nevertheless, given that students’ attachment

and bonds to schools can hardly be seen as fully isolated from characteristics at the school

level and the more general school context, researchers have not surprisingly also directed

MARKETIZED MENTALITY, SCHOOLS, AND DELINQUENCY 335

attention to the nature and type of organizational structure of the school or its climate,

recognizing that such factors may promote or inhibit bonding and attachment to school.

School climate has been defined broadly with different dimensions, such as school culture,

school organizational structure, social milieu, and ecological environment (Stewart, 2003:

580; see Gottfredson, 2001: 62–91, for a review of the early studies of “school effects” on

delinquency).

A common approach in educational research on school context is to conceptualize the

school as a community (e.g., Furman, 2012). This approach has also been applied in stud-

ies on school delinquency that couple school attachment with the school context by focus-

ing on communal school organization (Battistich and Hom, 1997; Kirk, 2009; Payne, 2008;

Payne, Gottfredson, and Gottfredson, 2003) and school climate (Stewart, 2003). Accord-

ing to Payne, Gottfredson, and Gottfredson (2003: 751), a “communally organized school

emphasizes informal social relations, common norms and experiences, and collaboration

and participation; by contrast, more bureaucratic schools emphasize formal organization,

technical knowledge, and regulation and standardization.” According to the authors, the

idea of communal school organization is similar to Sampson’s concept of neighborhood

collective efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997), in which shared expecta-

tions and mutual engagement by residents are stressed for the purposes of social con-

trol, which in turn lowers levels of crime and delinquency. More generally, communal

school organization refers to schools that stress supportive and collaborative relationships

among school members, as well as common organizational goals and norms (see Payne,

Gottfredson, and Gottfredson, 2003: 772).

Empirical researchers have documented the utility of the general construct of the

communal school for understanding undesirable student outcomes. For example, by

using multilevel modeling, Battistich and Hom (1997) found that higher levels of a

school sense of community were associated with significantly less student drug use and

delinquent behavior. By building on this research and findings that student bonding, that

is, attachment, is also predictive of school disorder and delinquency, Payne, Gottfredson,

and Gottfredson (2003) connected measures of communal school organization, student

bonding, and school disorder in mediational analyses at the school level to get a more

complete picture of the mechanisms that lead to the formerly found connection between

communal school organization and disruptive behavior and delinquency. They confirmed

that the social organization of a particular school influences the level of disorder in

that school. Stewart (2003: 589) also stressed the importance of a perspective that

focuses on school-level characteristics and concluded that more research is needed to

“understand the relationships among school delinquency, individual factors, and school

factors.” Moreover, he addressed former empirical shortcomings by employing multilevel

modeling techniques to assess cross-level explanations of delinquency. In following the

research mentioned earlier, Stewart (2003) also connected social bonds, informed by

Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, and school-level characteristics, informed by

school climate theories.1School social bonds were found to play a substantial role in

1. School culture was conceptualized similarly to communal school as explained in Payne,

Gottfredson, and Gottfredson (2003). With respect to school organization, Stewart (2003) incor-

porated measures of class and school size. School climate was understood as the social milieu of

the school, that is, the background characteristics of the students, teachers, and administrators,

including ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES).