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Book Chapter: Controlling Corporate Crimes in Times of De-regulation and Re-regulation
Abstract
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 scrutiny. Several factors are illuminated in this regard: that how we define corporate crime matters, shaping how we perceive and respond to the problem; that corporate crime is a structural problematic with roots in capitalist notions of sacrifice and the legal structure of the modern corporation; that laws intended to curb corporate offending paradoxically reinforce corporate impunity; and that neoliberal beliefs that corporations are inherently good and law‐abiding serve to differentiate corporate offending from “real” crimes.
... This "lack of will" to better understand the prevalence of elite white-collar and corporate crime is likely linked in part to a reluctance to aggressively pursue these crimes for prosecution or the overreliance on non-prosecution agreements, deferred prosecution agreements, or civil litigation (Garrett, 2014;Pontell et al., 2014). While arguably this is related to the unique difficulties of pursuing prosecution of WCC (Benson et al., 1990;Benson & Cullen, 1998), it is notable that there has been a considerable unwillingness to tackle these issues with effective legislation, leading to corporate scandals and major societal consequences every few years (Bittle & Hebert, 2019; see also Michalowski & Kramer, 1987, among others). Without greater awareness of the harms of elite WCC, such cognitive frameworks remain unchallenged. ...
A significant amount of criminological research has focused on explaining the overrepresentation of Black individuals in crime, attributing them with disproportionate criminal involvement. However, evidence suggests that the most severe crimes, particularly elite white-collar crime, can be disproportionately attributed to White individuals. This study tests the Theory of Racial Privilege and Offending, which argues that racial dynamics in the United States shape cultural adaptations contributing to white-collar and corporate crime. These adaptations involve cognitive frameworks related to empathy, entitlement, and competition. The findings support the influence of race on financial conditions and racial isolation, mixed support for isolation's impact on cognitive frameworks linked to criminality, and strong support for the direct impact of cognitive frameworks and crime-specific justifications on offending likelihood. The study concludes with implications for research and policy.
... Whereas FBI has a broader definition for financial crimes which includes cheque fraud, health care fraud, corporate fraud, mortgage fraud, money laundering, public corruption, terrorist financing, and identity theft. Some commit a financial crime to benefit themselves referred to as occupational crime, while others commit a crime to benefit the organization referred to as corporate crime (Bittle & Hébert, 2020). Financial crime can be based on a number of techniques such as creative accounting (Gupta & Kumar, 2020a) and identity theft (Gupta & Kumar, 2020b). ...
White-collar crimes (WCC) or financial crimes (FC) are the crimes that are linked with the top-level management representatives who are responsible to make the right decisions for the better functioning of the organization, these individuals are highly respectable as they hold a position of high repute. However, when the same individuals either under the pressure of performance or personal issues misuse the power and control vested on them due to the position they hold in the organization, take certain decisions which lead the organization into jeopardy. These individuals not only put the hard-earned money of the investors on stake but also enjoy the best of the facilities on the basis of their position. In the said article the authors have tried to answer two major questions regarding the abuse of position and manipulation of the financial statements at the struggling phase of the firm. The base of the study is convenience theory which was used to understand the concept of convenience theory for which a questionnaire based on 7-point Likert scale was used in which responses of 230 MBA students were studied. The results were near to what were expected supporting the fact that individuals are misusing their position to commit WCC, supporting the concept of convenience theory being used in the study.
Dans l’espace que lui donne le partage des compétences dans la Loi constitutionnelle de 1867, le Québec a fait des efforts considérables, au cours des 20 dernières années, pour mettre en place des mesures législatives et administratives visant à combattre la criminalité en col blanc et à placer le financement des partis politiques à l’abri des influences partisanes. Les nombreux scandales économiques tant dans le secteur des affaires privées que dans l’administration publique, ainsi que les délibérations publiques de la commission Charbonneau concernant la corruption et la collusion dans l’octroi et la gestion des contrats publics dans l’industrie de la construction ont alimenté la critique collective et la montée d’un mouvement social suffisamment puissant pour qu’il impose les objectifs à l’agir étatique. La province de Québec, qui a longtemps été perçue comme le terreau le plus fertile à la corruption et à la collusion au Canada, est devenue, en quelques années seulement, un chef de file dans le combat de la criminalité en col blanc.
This article explores how Puerto Rico’s anticorruption laws have spurred the development of a new market for public procurement. This market enables significant investments in platforms, websites, training and educational materials, and consulting services to aid compliance with anticorruption legislations. This has given rise to an emerging economic sector where consulting, law, and technology firms thrive. This article aims to elucidate how the Puerto Rican government’s commodification of anticorruption and anti-fraud interventions, and its outsourcing to consulting firms can be understood as part of a colonial regime of permission which normalized corruption and capital accumulation through wealth extraction. Through four examples of anticorruption public procurement – anticorruption legislation, post-Hurricane María recovery, and economic assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic – it demonstrates that wealth extraction is a key driver behind these anticorruption laws, ultimately creating an anticorruption market.
This chapter begins by acknowledging some of the remarkable achievements in Box’s contribution to the study of corporate crime. Then, by way of a sympathetic critique, it goes on to consider a presence and an absence in Box’s chapter, arguing that each is problematic and, indeed, that each of these aspects of Box’s analysis is related to the other. By the ‘presence’ I refer to Box’s discussion around how to respond to corporate crime. In my view, while this is not without merit, Box betrays some analytical tensions if not theoretical naivety—not least through his assumptions about the potential role of ‘the state and its criminal justice system’ (ibid.: 66). Thus, the absence I go on to discuss is Box’s twin failure here to address theoretically the nature of the state and what, therefore, is meant by ‘regulation’—and both the essence and limits of this latter term. I claim that we cannot understand corporate crime without grasping its relationship to the state, not least through the nature of regulation and what it is designed to achieve. Further, these insights allow us subsequently to focus more sharply on the limits of reforms under a system of production that is dominated by corporate capital—a necessary task that Box more than glimpses but ultimately failed to follow through adequately.
This chapter foregrounds stakeholder theory, with various perspectives considered to explain how businesses mobilize and respond to various interest groups. In this sense the social license is the set of demands and expectations held by local stakeholders and broader society about how a business should operate. Coverage includes the process of gaining and maintaining a social license and the involvement of business stakeholders, before exploring specific stakeholder influences, such as the impact of community religion, workplace management immorality, the magnitude of offender recidivism, the effect of white-collar support groups, and the pursuit of former Chief Executives.
The Icelandic fishing group Samherji was accused of paying bribes to trawl an African country’s waters. The newspaper Financial Times reported in November 2019 that two ministers in Namibia had resigned and that Samherji’s chief executive had temporarily stepped down over allegations that the company paid bribes for fishing quotas in the southern African nation’s maritime waters. The whistleblower at Samherji told WikiLeaks and then Al Jazeera. The whistleblowing caused legal actions against bribed officials in Namibia, while it caused no legal actions against bribing executives in Iceland. Samherji kept its legal license to operate. However, lack of legal actions did not prevent violation of the social license to operate for Samherji. One of the critics causing harm to Samherji’s social license was the public broadcasting in Iceland. Another source of authority was the broadcasting cooperation Al Jazeera. Norwegian bank DNB ended the client relationship with Samherji in 2018. This was more than one year after bank executives at DNB learned about the risk and the potential scandal. In 2015, DNB did make a customer update regarding Samherji registered on the Marshall Island, but bank executives failed in establishing an overview of the real owners.KeywordsGuilty mind, Shady businessCorporate wrongdoingNamibiaIcelandScapegoatRelationships
Law enforcement is not just a matter of policing as discussed in the previous chapter. Cybercrime is a concern of national states as well as international organizations. White-collar offenders online are businesspeople on the wrong side of the law.
External white-collar offenders are individuals who have legitimate access to premises and systems that they use to commit and conceal financial crime harming other individuals and organizations online. This chapter presents three case studies of external white-collar offenders online. The first case study is concerned with movie piracy, where the perpetrator was able to commit financial crime in terms of advertising revenues from illegal access to the software platform Popcorn Time.
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 between crime, law and the state in the reproduction of the capitalist social order. Historically, crimes of the powerful were largely neglected in crime and deviance studies, but there is now an important and growing body of work addressing this gap. This book brings together leading international scholars to discuss the legacy of Frank Pearce’s book and his work in this area, demonstrating the invaluable contributions a critical Marxist framework brings to studies of corporate and state crimes, nationally, internationally and on a global scale.
This book is neither a hagiography, nor a review of random areas of social scientific interest. Instead, it draws together a collection of scholarly and original articles which draw upon and critically interrogate the continued significance of the approach pioneered in Crimes of the Powerful. The book traces the evolution of crimes of the powerful empirically and theoretically since 1976, shows how critical scholars have integrated new theoretical insights derived from post-structuralism, feminism and critical race studies and offers perspectives on how the crimes of the powerful - and the enormous, ongoing destruction they cause - can be addressed and resisted.
The state-corporate crime literature has given momentum to a fundamentally important task: that of “bringing the state back in” to the study of the social harms caused by corporations. Yet as this article argues, we need to widen the theoretical scope of the concept of “state-corporate crime” if we are to grasp the full significance of state-corporate symbiosis in the production of corporate crime. The article argues for a historically and systemically sensitive analysis of the state-corporate relation that takes account of the a priori constitutional features of the relationship between states and corporations in contemporary capitalist democracies. The article therefore uses the state-corporate crime literature as a point of departure for understanding a deeper structural relation between organized capital and state institutions.
These are fortuitous times for considering zombies. Since Romero’s reinvention of the zombie, they have been represented as mindless consumers, habituated into going to the shopping mall even after they are dead. For him, shopping is our farcical resurrection. It now appears that much of that mindless shopping was fueled by consumer debt facilitated by what is called the “democratization of credit” in deregulated globalized capital markets, made familiar by ubiquitous credit cards and home equity lines of credit (Harman 2009: 288-289; Panitch and Gindin 2009; OCED 2008). We also have the progeny of Japan’s lost economic decade of the 1990s: the “zombie” firms now found globally (Cooley 2009). What is striking is that the image of the zombie as a dead human that has come back to some semblance of life and then heads to the shopping mall, appears to have been the harbinger of the current recession: people borrowed – “buying on time” (as it used to be called) - to consume. This is why the Great Recession is treated as distinct from other modern recessionary periods with the exception of the Great Depression. Like the latter, it is a balance sheet recession in which households, firms and governments seek to deleverage and avoid solvency crises, a real possibility given exceptionally high levels of debt (Callinicos 2010: 85). Our future promise to pay, as indicated underneath the signature line on a credit card slip, was the fuel for zombie-ish shopping and for global economic growth. Consumption accounts for about 70% of GDP in the US and 60% in resource rich Canada. Romero’s lesson: consumption has consumed our lives. Below, we offer our reflections on zombies and the current conjuncture by drawing on Georges Bataille’s work as a sociological “stimulus package” not least because consumption, excess, sacrifice and destruction are his main reference points. We also draw on two of Bataille’s main analytical resources: Marx and Durkheim. We contend that zombies, as represented in film and in the current phenomenon of zombie economic agents, mythologize a central temporal contradiction facing the working class, one that cannot be solved within the structure of capitalist futures. Yet, this temporal contradiction remains suggestive of the power of consumption to consume the “brains” of capital that constrain politics.
Drawing upon a wide range of sources of empirical evidence, historical analysis and theoretical argument, this book shows beyond any doubt that the private, profit-making, corporation is a habitual and routine offender. The book dissects the myth that the corporation can be a rational, responsible, 'citizen'. It shows how in its present form, the corporation is permitted, licensed and encouraged to systematically kill, maim and steal for profit. Corporations are constructed through law and politics in ways that impel them to cause harm to people and the environment. In other words, criminality is part of the DNA of the modern corporation. Therefore, the authors argue, the corporation cannot be easily reformed. The only feasible solution to this 'crime' problem is to abolish the legal and political privileges that enable the corporation to act with impunity.
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 offences causing injury or death are treated as potentially criminal events. Through a discourse analysis of legal and regulatory texts and documents, the authors argue that the constitution of workplace safety crime is rooted in complex historical factors that shape state responses to corporate wrongdoing. This article documents the roots of this “common sense” view of workplace crime, empirically focusing on Canadian corporate negligence law, and concludes with tentative strategies of resistance and change.
Despite the influence corporations wield over all aspects of everyday life, there has been a remarkable absence of critical inquiry into the social constitution of this power. In analysing the complex relationship between corporate power and the widespread phenomenon of share ownership, this book seeks to map and define the nature of resistance and domination in contemporary capitalism. Drawing on a Marxist-informed framework, this book reconnects the social constitution of corporate power and changing forms of shareholder activism. In contrast to other texts that deal with corporate governance, this study examines a diverse and comprehensive set of themes, from socially responsible investing to labour-led shareholder activism and its limitations. Through this ambitious and critical study, author Susanne Soederberg demonstrates how the corporate governance doctrine represents an inherent feature of neoliberal rule, effectively disembedding and depoliticising relations of domination and resistance from the wider power and paradoxes of capitalism. Examining corporate governance and shareholder activism in a number of different contexts that include the United States and the global South, this important book will be of interest to students and scholars of international political economy, international relations and development studies. It will also be of relevance to a wider range of disciplines including finance, economics, and business and management studies. Winner of the Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Award.
Análisis crítico sobre la empresa o corporación, vista como una institución creada por las leyes para funcionar en forma semejante a una personalidad psicópata, cuyo comportamiento destructivo si es dejado sin freno ni restricción, conduce a la ruina. El autor, profesor y teórico del derecho, sostiene sin embargo que el cambio es posible y perfila un programa de reformas concretas, pragmáticas y realistas a través de la regulación y el control democrático. Apoyado en una extensa investigación, el volumen presenta entrevistas a fondo con personajes como Hank McKinnell, jefe ejecutivo de la empresa Pfizer; el economista Milton Friedman, reconocido con el premio Nobel, o el teórico de la gestión empresarial Peter Drucker. El presente estudio fue empleado posteriormente como base argumental para una película documental, codirigida por Mark Achbar y Jenniffer Abbott, disponible en el Fondo de Material Audiovisual de la Biblioteca del ITESO.
This paper considers the context for the development of the concept of responsive regulation, namely the transcending of the deregulation debate. It argues that claims regarding responsive regulation when allied to risk-based rationales for enforcement can, in fact, allow a “deregulatory” momentum to develop. This argument is grounded with reference to a case study of the regulation of workplace health and safety in the UK, with a particular focus upon the period 2000–2010. The paper casts doubt on the relevance and robustness of the concept of responsive regulation. In a context that might have been fertile ground for developing genuinely responsive regulatory policy, empirically we find the development of policies that are better described as “regulatory degradation.” Thus we argue in this paper that, whatever the intentions of its proponents, there is a logical affinity between responsive regulation, and effective de-regulation, and that it is this affinity that has provided a convenient political rationale for the emergence of a neo-liberal regulatory settlement in the UK.
The second edition of Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism (2004) won the Best Book of the Year award from the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association. In the third edition, Dr. Chasin updates and expands the previous material, discussing the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis, access to firearms, and white supremacist movements. Written in a readable, accessible style, this book is a thoroughly documented account of the importance of connecting economic and political inequalities to dangers people face. The book emphasizes the importance of recognizing both structural and organizational violence, as well as discussing forms of interpersonal violence. Chasin analyzes relationships between social class, race/ethnicity, gender, and the three forms of violence.
Drawing extensively on empirical studies from the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, John Braithwaite and Ian Ayres offer an well-argued addition to the comparative literature on government regulation. In an effort to transcend the ongoing debate between those who favour strong state regulation and those who call for deregulation, they argue that regulation does not have to proceed with an adversarial tone, nor does it have to be `soft’ or `hard’ to be effective.
In this provocative new book, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty contend that the police have become information brokers to institutions such as insurance companies and health and welfare organizations that operate based on a knowledge of risk. In turn, these institutions influence the ways that police officers think and act. A critical review of existing research reveals the need to study police interaction with institutions as well as individuals. These institutions are part of an emerging "risk society" where knowledge of risk is used to control danger. The authors examine different aspects of police involvement; the use of surveillance technologies and the collection of data on securities, careers and different social, ethnic, age and gender groups. They conclude by looking at how police organizations have been forced to develop new communications rules and technologies to meet external demands for knowledge of risk. This is the first book in this field to include detailed evidence of some of the central tenets of the risk society. It also includes a sophisticated examination of the risk society theory that will advance readers' knowledge considerably. With this book, the authors revolutionize the study of policing, and their work will impact heavily on scholars in criminology, social theory, and communications as well as policing and the public.
Why do corporations obey the law? When companies violate the law, what kinds of interventions are most apt to correct their behavior and return them to compliant status? In this book Sally Simpson examines whether the shift towards the use of criminal law, with its emphasis on punishment and stigmatization, is an effective strategy for controlling illegal corporate behavior. She concludes that strict criminalization models will not yield sufficiently high levels of compliance. Empirical data suggest that in most cases cooperative models work best with most corporate offenders. Because some corporate managers, however, respond primarily to instrumental concerns, Simpson argues that compliance should also be buttressed by punitive strategies. Her review and application of the relevant empirical literature on corporate crime and compliance combined with her judicious examination of theory and approaches, make a valuable new contribution to the literature on white-collar crime and deterrence and criminal behavior more generally.
Es posible pensar la crisis económica actual como el resultado de una matriz multidimensional de causas sistémicas que operan de acuerdo con un número finito de dinámicas estructurales y de variables geoeconómicas y geopolíticas cuyas lógicas definen la reproducción de la estructura social de acuerdo con las pautas de comportamiento generadas por el capitalismo histórico o tan solo debemos interpretarla como el desajuste parcial de un sistema económico que carece de historia y racionalidad sistémica y cuya lógica únicamente puede reconstruirse de acuerdo con el concepto neoclásico y neoliberal de mercado y con el modelo de elección racional del homo economicus? ¿Es la crisis que arranca de 2008-2009 una crisis antropológica y ética, una crisis del mercado y de sus modos de organización de la competencia, una crisis de los modelos de regulación y de governance inspirados por el frame neoliberal impuesto durante las últimas décadas o estamos ante una crisis del capitalismo concebido como sistema de reproducción social y de los equilibrios de su último ciclo sistémico de acumulación estadounidense así como de las relaciones de fuerza existentes entre los sujetos colectivos que se involucran en los procesos de producción y de reproducción social y en la traducción política de sus necesidades en los ámbitos nacionales, regionales y globales? ¿Es posible ofrecer una interpretación de la crisis de acuerdo con el concepto estándar de racionalidad económica que inspira los paradigmas interpretativos predominantes en las ciencias sociales y humanas contemporáneas o es preciso recurrir simultáneamente a una teoría coherente del capitalismo como sistema social e histórico y a una teoría del poder inherente al mismo que nos ofrezcan herramientas para comprender el ciclo integral de la dominación y la explotación social, política, económica y cultural que definen los contornos de un momento histórico determinado?
This chapter examines an aspect of the “imaginary social order” that was integral to the analysis within Crimes of the Powerful, but has rarely been adequately explored: the “belief that the interests of labour are essentially the same as the interests of capital”. As Frank Pearce powerfully demonstrated, considerable ideological work went into constructing and reproducing the idea that the relationship between labour and capital was basically consensual, and certainly democratic, in the forms of social order that were the subject of his analysis. Yet despite the importance of this insight – not least for its contribution to the theorisation of the state within Crimes of the Powerful – it is an observation that some four decades later needs expansion. Against the backdrop of the sustained neoliberal revolution that has swept through the political and cultural landscape, unwaged or-sub-waged labour has been (re)embedded and reformulated in the delivery of mainstream welfare and criminal policy
Why are crimes of the suite punished more leniently than crimes of the street? When police killings of citizens go unpunished, political torture is sanctioned by the state, and the financial frauds of Wall Street traders remain unprosecuted, nothing succeeds with such regularity as the active failures of national states to obstruct the crimes of the powerful. Written from the perspective of global sustainability and as an unflinching and unforgiving exposé of the full range of the crimes of the powerful, Unchecked Corporate Power reveals how legalized authorities and political institutions charged with the duty of protecting citizens from law-breaking and injurious activities have increasingly become enablers and colluders with the very enterprises they are obliged to regulate. Here, Gregg Barak explains why the United States and other countries are duplicitous in their harsh reactions to street crimes in comparison to the significantly more harmful and far-reaching crimes of the powerful, and why the crimes of the powerful are treated as beyond incrimination. What happens to nations that surrender ever-growing economic and political power to the globally super rich and the mammoth multinational corporations they control? And what can people from around the world do to resist the criminality and victimization perpetrated by multinationals, and generated by the prevailing global political economy? Barak examines an array of multinational crimes-corporate, environmental, financial, and state-and their state-legal responses, and outlines policies and strategies for revolutionizing these contradictory relations of capital reproduction, criminality, and unsustainability.
Although there are various definitions of the sociology of law, fundamentally, it explores relationships between law and society. Rejecting the primacy of the state as a source of law and not limiting itself to formal legal rules, the sociology of law focuses on various forms of social ordering processes. A sociological focus on the centrality of law can be traced back to classic social theory, variations of which see law as a key index and motor of societal change. The sociology of law draws upon a range of disciplines from the social sciences and beyond. Seeking to understand how “law” is constructed in and through a highly fragmented and multifaceted set of structures, institutions and practice, it studies “law in action” across a variety of research areas and via a wide range of methods.
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) legislation. This paper addresses this lacuna by comparing and contrasting the development of CCL in Canada and Finland. By scrutinizing the law reform processes in each jurisdiction, the paper documents how CCL emerged under different conjunctures in each country, yet were shaped similarly by hegemonic beliefs in the non-criminal status of corporation, the importance of advancing private enterprise and established jurisprudence. Of particular note are the ways in which dominant notions of legal individualism and the universal legal subject constrained legislative efforts to hold corporations criminally to account therein preventing corporate misconduct from being processed as “real” crimes.
UK austerity policies include anti-regulatory pressures to ‘free up’ private capital to produce wealth, employment and tax revenues. This topical book by a recognised scholar on the regulation of corporate crime and social harm considers the economic, political and social consequences of the economic crisis, the nature of social protection and the dynamics of the current crisis of regulation. It is unique in documenting how economic and social welfare are inconsistent with corporate freedom, and in an empirical and theoretical analysis of regulatory reform within the context of wide-scale social change. Based on empirical research and with a focus on environmental, food, and workplace safety, it considers how we reached the current crisis of anti-regulation and how we might overcome it. The author proposes radically rethinking ‘regulation’ to address conceptual, policy and practical issues, making the book essential reading for those interested in this important topic.
The recent Enron-type scandals were portrayed as assaults by venal corporate officials and their ethically challenged professional advisors on the legitimacy of the Anglo-American corporation and, therefore, as attacks on everything that is to be treasured. They were depicted as a form of terrorism by evil-doers who hate decency and achievement. The overblown analogy came easily to “spin doctors.” The 9/11 assaults had destroyed the towers that symbolized the interconnection between the American way of life and the corporation. George W. Bush embraced this imagery when he signed the remedial Sarbanes-Oxley Act into law:
During the past year the American economy has faced several sudden challenges and proven its great resiliency. Terrorists attacked the center and symbol of our prosperity. …. And now corporate corruption has struck at investor confidence, offending the conscience of our nation. Yet, in the aftermath of September the 11th, we refuse to allow fear to undermine our economy. And we will not allow fraud to undermine it either… [T]he law says to honest corporate leaders: your integrity will be recognized and rewarded, because the shadow of suspicion will be lifted from good companies that respect the rules.”1 Despite the rhetoric, however, the steps taken did not amount to an attempt at regime change. Rather, the focus was to reassure the public that, as bad apples would be taken out of the barrel, it would be safer than ever to invest in private corporations and that this would help to provide ever-increasing economic welfare.
In this article we engage in an extended critique of the thesis that the illegal conduct of corporations necessarily calls for different forms of regulation than other kinds of law-breaking. The proponents of that view argue that the unique nature of such illegalities is one reason why they necessitate a particular type of enforcement attitude or response. They advocate a strategy that produces compliance through persuasion rather than through the threat of sanctions. Another reason advanced is that corporations are not, as many would have it, 'amoral calculators', but rather 'political citizens' who may indeed sometimes err but are more prone to organizational incompetence than deliberate wrongdoing. Thus they need advice rather than chastisement: regulatory agencies should act as consultants rather than policemen. We will take each element of this argument in turn and show that it is neither logically nor empirically persuasive. We will then turn to the issue of how to make corporate regulation more effective and show that this requires a consideration of both the most suitable strategies for the enforcement agencies to adopt and the most appropriate legal framework for determining the criminal responsibility of these corporations. © 1990 The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.
Many books seek to explain the general principles of the criminal law. Crime, Reason and History stands out and alone as a book that critically and concisely analyses these principles and comes up with a different viewpoint: that the law is shaped by social history and therefore systematically structured around conflicting elements. Updated extensively to include two new chapters on loss of control and self defence and with an extended treatment of offence and defence, this new edition combines challenging and sophisticated analysis with accessibility.
In this concentrated and detailed look at questions surrounding the act of sacrifice, Dennis King Keenan discusses both the role and the meaning of sacrifice in our lives. Building on recent philosophical discussions on the gift and transcendence, Keenan covers new ground with this exploration of the religious, psychological, and ethical issues that sacrifice entails. According to Keenan, sacrifice is paradoxically called to sacrifice itself. But what does this necessary, yet impossible condition mean for living an ethical life? Along the way to an answer, Keenan considers the views of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Levinas, Blanchot, Irigaray, Derrida, Kristeva, Nancy, and Zizek. This thoughtful and provocative work affords a sophisticated philosophical treatment of the question of sacrifice.
The extension of the state's authority into the economic sphere in advanced capitalist formations has entailed not only the growth of the regular departmental apparatus but also the multiplication of independent boards and commissions whose legitimacy is seen to reside in their insulation from political pressure and their technical expertise. Critics of such agencies, however, have pointed to the ironic fact that rather than increasing the state's capacity to ensure that corporate decisions accord with the 'public interest' the proliferation of such institutions has rendered the state more vulnerable to corporate influence.
This analysis of how multilevel networked governance has superseded the liberal system of interdependent states focuses on the role of law in mediating power and shows how lawyers have shaped the main features of capitalism, especially the transnational corporation. It covers the main institutions regulating the world economy, including the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and a myriad of other bodies. The book introduces the reader to key regulatory arenas: corporate governance; competition policy; investment protection; anti-corruption rules; corporate codes and corporate liability; international taxation, tax avoidance–evasion and the campaign to combat them; the offshore finance system; international financial regulation and its contribution to the financial crisis; trade rules and their interaction with standards, especially for food safety and environmental protection; the regulation of key services (telecommunications and finance); intellectual property; and the tensions between exclusive private rights and emergent forms of common and collective property in knowledge.
Providing a much-needed critique of Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) practice and scholarship, this book seeks to redress Csr advocacy, from a political and critical perspective. A strident approach backed up by extensive use of case studies presents the argument that most Csr-related activity aims to gain legitimacy from consumers and employees, and therefore furthers the exploitative and colonizing agenda of the corporation. By examining Csr in the context of the political economy of late capitalism, the book puts the emphasis back on the fact that most large corporations are fundamentally driven by profit maximization, making Csr initiatives merely another means to this end. Rather than undermining or challenging unsustainable corporate practices Csr is exposed as an ideological practice that actually upholds the prominence of such practices.
This article reviews the literature inspired by Ayres and Braithwaite’s (1992b) Responsive Regulation. It discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the responsive regulation approach, as well as its theoretical and policy contributions. After outlining the aspects of responsive regulation that have been studied extensively, special attention is paid to those aspects of the original theory that remain neglected. In addition to theoretical inattention, it is clear that agencies in the United States have failed to formally adopt this regulatory strategy—reasons for this are discussed. The article also reviews strengths and weakness of the original formulation, noting attempts to revise and improve it in recent years. To conclude, it evaluates the current state of Responsive Regulation and offers suggestions for future research.
One: Introduction. Two: Regulation and Context. Three: Exploring Death at Work. Four: Operationalizing Virtue: The Responses to Death. Five: Preliminary Responses, Coping or Denial. Six: Business Cultures: Consensus and Conflict. Seven: What Constrains Virtue? The Role of Size and Position in the Contracting Hierarchy. Eight: How is Virtue Produced? The Role of Law and Law Enforcement. Nine: The Broad Context of Response: Competing Demand and Prospects for the Future. Ten: Conclusion. Index
This article examines the rise of algorithmic trading and the invention of new financial instruments, their implications and effects. It politicizes and denaturalizes the technological 'innovations' that have created networks of control over groups that states and corporations have designated as threatening, then examines how such 'innovations' have transformed stock market trading from a geographically-fixed, paper-based institution to a high-speed electronic casino. Finally, it discusses how and why financial actors have amassed the social, economic and political power that allows them to engage in practices that cause immense social harm while remaining virtually untouched by state regulatory agencies, civil and criminal law.
After some 14 years in the making, 2007 saw the passage of the UK's Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, which came into force in 2008. The aim of the Act was to facilitate the prosecution of medium and larger organisations following work-related deaths. It is with the nature and potential of such prosecutions that this paper is concerned. The paper begins by noting the emergence of the Act, before focusing on the three cases taken under it to date. The paper then considers reasons for there being, thus far, only three prosecutions under the Act, and addresses this at three levels: in relation to the law itself, the way in which it is enforced, and the wider political and economic contexts in which it has emerged. It concludes that the law may have symbolic significance only – albeit that this is not to dismiss it as wholly irrelevant.
This essay recovers the redemptive significance of “sacrifice” as the form of Christian resistance to global capitalism. The argument unfolds by way of a comparison of sacrifice, as presented by Anselm, with one of the most compelling contemporary theological accounts of justice and human rights—that of the Latin American liberationists. After showing how the liberationists' vision is implicated in the capitalist order, I argue that Anselm's account of sacrifice displays the advent of the aneconomic order of divine charity and that it is only the recovery of life in this aneconomic mode of donation and gift that can deliver us from capitalism.
This article seeks to tease out the various processes by which states and corporations exist in increasingly symbiotic relationships, which in turn are crucial to understanding the systematic, routine production of crimes and harms. Despite the value of the concept of "statecorporate crime", it tends to obscure these underlying relationships and processes through an abstracted focus on events and collaborations. At worst, this tends towards an empiricism which fails to advance our understanding of the dynamics of state-corporate relationships. This is a particularly timely moment for such considerations, as governments and supranational capitalist institutions struggle to produce a "response" to the financial crisis, out of which are developing new forms of ongoing relationships between states and the corporate sector-themselves possibly producing new and greater levels of "crime". The article concludes with suggestions as to how its insights may be operationalized.
