Steven BittleUniversity of Ottawa · Department of Criminology
Steven Bittle
Doctor of Philosophy, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
About
46
Publications
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207
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Steven Bittle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa.
Publications
Publications (46)
This article critically examines structural impediments to the enforcement of laws that criminalize corporations for negligently killing workers and/or the public. Drawing empirically from a case in which three Canadian Pacific Railway workers were killed on the job and questions followed about the company’s negligence for the deaths, as well as th...
Using the SNC case as its foil, this chapter looks beyond regulatory capture to examine the ways in which anti-corruption enforcement is shaped by the relationship between states and corporations in capitalist society. We begin from the premise that SNC’s case is partially a tale of Canada’s weak enforcement of existing laws prohibiting foreign cor...
Using the SNC case as its foil, this chapter looks beyond regulatory capture to examine the ways in which anti-corruption enforcement is shaped by the relationship between states and corporations in capitalist society. We begin from the premise that SNC’s case is partially a tale of Canada’s weak enforcement of existing laws prohibiting foreign cor...
Since the early 2000s, a number of Western capitalist states, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have enacted criminal laws aimed at holding corporations to account for negligently killing workers or members of the public. In the United States, however, the existing respondeat superior (vicarious liability) regime remains intact....
This entry explores why corporations and corporate executives produce so much harm and devastation and why states routinely fail to discipline corporations accordingly. It examines the structural conditions that make corporate crime both possible and plausible – the factors that render the corporation inherently criminogenic. Several issues are con...
In April 2008, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (CMCHAct) came into force in the UK. Since then, the Act has failed to live up to expectations, resulting in only 26 convictions in the first decade of its existence, despite thousands of work‐related fatalities during this time. This article critically analyses these CMCHAct...
This chapter explores why corporations and corporate executives produce so much harm and devastation and why states regularly fail to discipline corporations in the face of such serious crimes. Of particular concern are the state “regimes of permission” that make corporate crime possible and which allow corporations to avoid criminal justice scruti...
This paper offers a methodological intervention into the study and understanding of regulation and compliance with respect to corporate crime. We advocate Pierre Bourdieu’s “praxeological” sociology as the bases for what we hold is an innovative model of regulation and compliance. The praxeological or relational approach offers structural analyses...
Frank Pearce was the first scholar to use the term 'crimes of the powerful.' His ground-breaking book of the same name provided insightful critiques of liberal orthodox criminology, particularly in relation to labelling theory and symbolic interactionism, while making important contributions to Marxist understandings of the complex relations betwee...
This paper critically examines official statistics on workplace fatalities in Canada. Each year the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada reports on the number of workers who die from a work-related injury or illness/disease. The problem, however, is that these data report the number of deaths that were accepted for compensation; it...
The first decade of the new millennium saw the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom enact criminal legislation intended to hold corporations accountable for negligently killing workers and/or members of the public. Drawing empirically from document analyses and semistructured interviews, as well as theoretical insights concerning the crisis...
Abolitionists have, since the 1960s, importantly denounced incarceration as ineffective, notably in terms of deterrence. It is thought to increase human suffering. Abolitionists reject the concept of crime, dismiss punitive responses to social problems and propose that they should be dealt with outside the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, the...
Over the past two decades, a number of states in the Global North have introduced laws aimed at holding corporations criminally liable. While there is an important literature examining these legal regimes there is a paucity of comparative work interrogating the different political struggles and processes leading to corporate criminal liability (CCL...
div class="title">Simons Penelope and Macklin Audrey The Governance Gap: Extractive industries, human rights, and the home state advantage. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2014, 422 pp.
- Steven Bittle
Plusieurs milliers de travailleurs meurent ou sont gravement blessés au travail au Canada, souvent dans des situations où les normes prévues dans les lois sur la santé et la sécurité du travail n'ont pas été respectées. Pourtant, il est rare que les accusations en vertu du Code criminel soient portées, et les condamnations de sociétés ou de cadres...
This paper uses Canada’s corporate criminal liability legislation as an empirical exemplar with which to interrogate the limits of using the law to address the abuses of corporate power and to protect workers’ safety. The author draws from Althusser’s notion of interpellation to contemplate whether demands to discipline corporations through the law...
This article interrogates the laws that govern safety crimes, harmful but typically unintentional acts of negligence that occur in the production of goods and services. Acts that injure employees at work are commonly depicted in legal discourses as accidents and penalized through administrative laws, although other negligent acts such as driving of...
This article uses Marxian class theory to examine the state's role in disciplining the modern corporation. Over the past decade, the Canadian government has enacted laws extending corporate criminal liability to safety crimes and stock market fraud, and considered, but ultimately decided against, legislation that would have made Canadian mining, oi...
The Westray +20 conference held at the University of Ottawa brought together academics
from a variety of disciplines and jurisdictions, workplace parties, prosecutors, law enforcement
specialists, policy-makers and politicians. In this synthesis, we refer to the material presented
during the symposium and the ensuing discussions, as well as the pap...
This special issue of Policy and Practice in Health and Safety stems from a symposium held
at the University of Ottawa, Canada, on 24–25 October 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary
of the Westray mine disaster. It brings together papers that focus on trends in corporate
criminal liability in a variety of jurisdictions. In this introduction we provide...
In recent years many academics, social activists and NGOs have turned to international bodies in an attempt to hold corporations accountable for their harmful and illegal acts. Significant amongst these is the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on issues of human rights and transnational corporations. In 2008, following extensive re...
In March 2004, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-45, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Criminal Liability of Organizations), thereby creating a legal duty for 'all persons directing work to take reasonable steps to ensure the safety of workers and the public' and attributing criminal liability to an 'organisation' if a senior officer knew...
This paper critically examines the enforcement, or lack thereof, of criminal laws relating to corporate crime. Using Canada's
recently enacted corporate criminal liability (safety crimes) and markets fraud legislation as its empirical focus, it seeks
to explain why these laws were introduced, only to fall into a state of virtual disuse. The authors...
This article looks at the assumptions, agendas, and relations of power that shaped Bill C-45, revisions to the Criminal Code of Canada aimed at strengthening corporate criminal liability. The Bill, passed in fall 2003, originated in response to the deaths of twenty-six workers at the Westray mine in 1993, a disaster caused by unsafe and illegal wor...
Projects
Projects (2)
This research critically examines Canada's reluctance to address corporate corruption. We argue that corporate corruption cannot be understood without situating it in the broader state-corporate nexus. Thus we will focus on how states and corporations interact to produce corporate corruption, as opposed to conceiving them as separate entities with competing interests. Theoretically the project draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “bureaucratic field” and the corporate crime literature on state-corporate symbiosis to probe the official discourses that shape official conceptualizations of corporate corruption and how these discourses correspond to the broader social-political-economic context.
The research project aims to examine the development, progression and implementation of corporate criminal liability in occupational safety crimes in Finland.
http://www.ttl.fi/en/research/research_projects/safety_crimes/Pages/default.aspx
