Are Workers More Likely to be Deviant than Managers? A Cross-National Analysis

Using Robert Merton’s perspective on social structure [Social theory and structure. Free Press, New York, 1968], this study tested the individual-level association between job position and ethical reasoning. Anomie theory was employed to examine how country-level factors moderate that individual-level association. The hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) method was used to analyze 22,359 subjects from 28 nations. The statistical results proved that workers are more likely to justify ethically suspect behaviors, and that this individual-level relationship is moderated by the country-level factors of power distance, masculinity, social inequality, and education accessibility. These results imply that Merton’s view of social structure and contemporary anomie theorists’ perspective of anomie [Messner and Rosenfeld (Crime and the American dream. Wadsworth, Belmont, <CitationRef CitationID="CR45">2001</CitationRef>); Rosenfeld and Messner (The future of anomie theory. Northeastern University Press, Boston, <CitationRef CitationID="CR59">1997</CitationRef>)] are mutually complementary rather than exclusive. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014