A Model of Organizational Anomie and its Creators

Postmodern theories claim that the developments in the business environment eliminate the effectiveness of the traditional mechanisms of organizational controls and replace them with a normative system. The disruption in the normative system creates a disturbing atmosphere in which the organization and its members are deprived of the achievement of a framework of behavioral guidance. This disruption was theorized as an “Anomie” in sociology, and this research attempts to develop the conceptual anomy of the organization and its causes. The present study modifies the extracted literature from sociology and management by the qualitative methodology and analyzing the deductive and inductive content of interviews conducted with academic experts (10 interviews through judgment and snowball sampling method). Five dimensions were identified for organizational anomie in the final model: Lack of attachment to norms, conflict in norms, weakness of norms, ambiguity in norms, and lack of norms. Results show that in addition to the importance of institutional variables in creating anomie space, there are also several inter-organizational variables (15 variables) that are related to different domains, especially culture and strategy. Therefore, managers of organizations can weaken the creators by strengthening the elements that influence the organization's culture and creating the coordination between different elements of the organization (culture-structure-environment-strategy). Considering the inclusion of the main Anomie theory in the functionalist paradigm, attention has also been paid to the postmodern paradigm in concluding and presenting the proposal. Finally, functional suggestions are provided for administrators to control anomic status.