Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct Analysis and Cases
We prove a fundamental attribution error connecting rule-breaking behavior to entrepreneurs. We do so in the research context of the US, where we recently sampled from medium-sized venture entrepreneurs and their corporate executive peers (as an applicable reference point). We chose the US not only for its high entrepreneurial activity, but also because of the not uncommon relationship between business leaders and religion. By including various measures of religiosity in the study, we could control for factors that would likely influence rule-breaking, which standard models like the fraud triangle do not explicitly consider. In fact, we add contingency theory ideas to the fraud triangle to determine whether it is the decision conditions that determine rule-breaking rather than the role of the person (i.e., as an entrepreneur). We find that once demographic, religious, firm and industry contingencies are controlled for, any statistically significant influence of being an entrepreneur (relative to being a corporate executive with similar opportunity, motivation, capability and rationalization) disappears when it comes to self-admitted value-bending behaviors at work. Our contribution consists of a novel analysis, results and discussion of the ‘bent’repreneur—adding to conversations on the under-researched nexus of entrepreneurship with religiosity and ethical decision-making.
Organizational misbehavior is primarily behavior that does not conform to expectations and which, although disapproved and discouraged, is not prevented. The main parts of this entry consider the noncompliant behavior of ordinary employees, which has been consistently researched for decades. Here misbehavior is revealed to involve limiting working effort and/or the time spent on work and the appropriation of materials or products. The identity and allegiance of the employee is also in contention. More recently, this aspect has become more significant, and some new types of expressive misbehavior have been identified. Some of these involve giving voice to criticism and some to making demands for action from management; examples here are demands for action on bullying and gender politics in the workplace. Comparable sociological research on other groups – such as professionals and senior managers – is relatively scarce, and so the misbehavior of managers, professionals, and workers is seldom realistically compared. However, new research now becoming available that makes possible the unification of this field.
In the past five years involvement of criminals in socially beneficial activities and philanthropy has received increasing attention in the Netherlands. Amateur football clubs appear to be particularly vulnerable to criminal infiltration. This paper presents the results of three exploratory studies conducted to answer two main questions. First, to what extent does criminal infiltration in amateur football occur, who are involved and what are their motives? Second, how may criminal infiltration be better prevented, both by clubs and public institutions? Suspected criminals have been active in amateur football as official and covert sponsors, as clubs’ presidents and coaches, or have misused clubs’ facilities for illegal activities. Our studies showed that in 2020, 19% of Dutch amateur football clubs reported to have been confronted with indications of attempted criminal infiltration and in this year the authorities had 40 cases under investigation. Criminal involvement in amateur football can be explained primarily from the perspective of social embeddedness and the aim to improve one’s status and social acceptation within local communities. Although awareness of the problem has been growing, preventing, detecting and tackling criminal infiltration may still be improved.
Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures.
Organizational misbehavior is one of a number of terms now used to designate an area of study of increasing interest to sociologists concerned with non‐compliant behavior at work. A wide range of terms are used to designate this subject area including anti‐social behavior in organizations, insidious workplace behavior, incivility, and organizational or employee deviance. Organizational misbehavior, being more inclusive than other terms, is perhaps the most frequently used general concept (Ackroyd & Thompson 1999; Vardi & Weitz 2004). Organizational misbehavior designates behavior that does not conform to managerial expectations or hopes and which, although discouraged, is not entirely prevented.
Everyone in the human generation is eager to achieve the best in life. However, in the hopes of getting the best, sometimes people resort to illegitimate means such as fraud. Frauds have been known since the very beginning of humankind. This kind of behavior has been justified in various disciplines, such as rational behavior in economics and the survival of the fittest in Darwin’s theory of evolution. With the growth of the economy and industrialization, the number of frauds and financial crimes has also increased. The concept of the fraud triangle tries to analyze the mind setup of the offenders of financial crime. The objective of the current paper is to study the impact of Donald Cressey’s theory on financial crimes and fraud. A few cases from around the world are used to try to figure out how the theory works.KeywordsFraud triangleFinancial crimesFinancial statementOffendersConveniencetriangle.
Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this book explores the analysis of crime-related language. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and intertextuality, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres, both fictitious (crime novels, and crime in TV, film and music), and in real life (crime reporting, prison discourse, and statements used in courts). It touches on current political topics like #BlackLivesMatter, human (child) trafficking, and the genocide of the Kurds among others, making it essential reading for linguists, criminologists and those with a general interest in crime-related topics alike. Covering a variety of text genres and methodological approaches, and united by the aim of deciphering how crime is portrayed ideologically, this book is the next step in developing research at the intersection of linguistics, criminology, literature and media studies.
In this article, I use a unique dataset consisting of listed Indian firms that have been indicted for economic malpractice/default or have been non-compliant with laws/ regulations/ guidelines to estimate the stock price impact of regulatory actions against corporate irregularities. The sample consists of regulatory charges imposed by two major Indian regulators, (i) the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and (ii) the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). I find that regulatory actions are an effective deterrence against corporate misconduct and have a significantly negative impact on a firm’s stock price. The level of negative effect on the stock price of a firm is directly related to the severity of regulatory charges against it, i.e., cases of fraud or cheating, or payment default attract a much more negative reaction as compared to cases such as failure to disclose information, other non-compliance, etc. Finally, the results indicate that younger and less profitable firms have a higher (more negative) stock price reaction to regulatory action announcements.
Geometric metaphors have been used in fraud theory for more than 60 years. The most commonly used of these metaphors is the fraud triangle. The fraud triangle has been criticized severely for its scope, substitutability of its elements, perceptuality, individuality and one-sidedness. Different models developed afterwards tried to cover the shortcomings of the fraud triangle with additions and modifications, but none of them became as popular as the fraud triangle. In this study, by moving away from the use of geometric metaphors, which has become a traditional approach in explaining the structure and causality of fraud, a model based on Situational Action Theory (SAT) is proposed. The aim of the study is to reveal that fraud has a complex and multi-dimensional structure that cannot be explained with one-dimensional metaphors, and in this context, to develop a theoretical model expressed in a mathematical formula for measuring fraud risk.
Perceived self-efficacy is often held to be the most focal mechanism of human agency. It has shown strong potential to explain action in multiple areas highly relevant to understanding crime, at least when the concept is formulated in close connection with the conditions that characterize the criminal acts it is supposed to explain. This article introduces the concept in the context of white-collar crime. To advance our understanding of how opportunities for such crime work, self-efficacy is defined with regard to one’s ability to control others’ impression of financially relevant information, or what is called dramaturgical self-efficacy . The presentation of this concept and its various elements is illustrated with contemporary empirical cases of white-collar crime and is preceded by a discussion of how opportunity structures and perceived self-efficacy have been understood in previous research relevant to the field. The article also discusses how the concept can be further developed with regard to the relationship between motivation and opportunity for white-collar crime.
Over the last decades scholars have been devoting more and more attention to differences and similarities between public and private sector organizations. Relatively underrepresented, when compared to studies on organizational status and management, are comparative empirical studies on the differences and similarities between the central values of public and private sector organizations. This article presents an overview of the academic debate on differences and similarities between the morals and values of public and private sector organizations. Public and private sector values derived from Administrative Ethics and Business Ethics literature are compared, as well as values that are mentioned in public and private sector codes of conduct. In addition, intra-sector comparisons between the values derived from literature reviews and those in codes are conducted. After the distinguished values are weighted, combined and supplemented, taking into account empirical research on public and private sector values as well, a definitive 'value panorama' is presented as a basis for empirical comparative research. Implications and strategies for future research are presented.
This chapter examines the use of techniques of neutralisation in newspaper writing on corporate wrongdoing between 2004 and 2014, using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. As “Koller, V. (2004). Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse. London: Palgrave”, suggests, business journalists tend to emulate the language and adopt the perspective of those corporate parties covered in their reporting. These newspaper articles argue, through various linguistic choices, that these acts were not committed, but even if they were, they were not, or should not be, considered criminal, especially as few people can legitimately be considered as victims of these acts. Furthermore, these corporate actors are rarely held responsible in these articles. In other words, newspaper reporting on corporate fraud shows many of the neutralisations that would also be expected in discourses of corporate actors. This, in turn, may have far-reaching effects, given the enduring importance of the traditional media in public understanding of crime and criminal justice.
Over the last decade, scholars across the wide spectrum of the discipline of sociology have started to reengage with questions on morality and moral phenomena. The continued wave of research in this field, which has come to be known as the new sociology of morality, is a lively research program that has several common grounds with scholarship in the field of business ethics. The aim of this thematic symposium is to open constructive dialogues between these two areas of study. In this introductory essay, we briefly present the project of the new sociology of morality and discuss its relevance for business ethics. We also review the contributions to this thematic symposium and identify four specific domains where future research can contribute to fruitful dialogues between the two fields.
Zusammenfassung
In der Forschung über Devianz wird in der Regel davon ausgegangen, dass eigennützige Regelabweichungen von Organisationsmitgliedern für die Organisation schädlich sind. Dabei wird eine Differenz zu für die Organisation funktionalen Regelabweichungen markiert. Basierend auf der Sekundäranalyse zentraler Studien über Unterschlagungen, Korruption oder Abstinenz von Organisationsmitgliedern wird in diesem Beitrag nach einer möglichen Funktionalität dieser Devianz für die Organisation gefragt. Während es sich in vielen Fällen um eine Schädigung von Organisation handelt, kann es – so das Argument – Fälle geben, in denen die Duldung von Unterschlagung, Korruption und Abstinenz als Teil eines informalen Belohnungs- und Anreizsystems genutzt wird.
This article begins by setting out an analysis of the process of conventionalizing corporate crime that arises from the symbiotic relationship between states and corporations. Noting briefly the empirical characteristics of four broad categories of corporate crime and harm, the article then turns to explore the role of the state in its production and reproduction. We then problematize the role of the state in the reproduction of corporate crime at the level of the global economy, through a discussion of the “crimes of globalization” and “ecocide,” warning of the tendency in the research literature to oversimplify the role of states and of international organizations. The article finishes by arguing that, as critical academics, it is our role to ensure that corporate crime is never normalized nor fully conventionalized in advanced capitalist societies.
In recent years, research on morality in organizational life has begun to examine how organizational conduct comes to be socially constructed as having failed to comply with a community’s accepted morals. Researchers in this stream of research, however, have paid little attention to identifying and theorizing the key actors involved in these social construction processes and the types of accounts they construct. In this paper, we explore a set of key structural and cultural dimensions of apparent noncompliance that enable us to distinguish between four categories of actors who engage in constructing the label of moral failure: dominant insiders, watchdog organizations, professional members, and publics. The analysis further clarifies which category of actor is more likely to succeed in constructing the label of moral failure under which circumstances, and what accounts they are likely to use, namely scapegoating, prototyping, shaming, and protesting.
In two studies, this paper examines age-graded informal social controls (bonds) in white-collar offenders. Using register data, Study 1 compares bonds in a sample of white-collar offenders to a matched control sample, while Study 2 uses probation data to examine bonds within a subsample of white-collar offenders of Study 1. The results show that white-collar offenders, including those who occupy executive positions and those with an adult-crime onset, were characterized by weakened bonds and that early-onset offenders had weaker bonds than adult-onset offenders. Along with the implications of these findings for theory, limitations and directions for future research are presented.
Bratu draws on extensive ethnographic material to explore the interplay between institutional demands and the vernacular practices of doing business. She shows that accessing EU funding is a complex, emotional process marked by confusion, ambiguity, miscommunication and struggles. The actors who apply for EU funding are influenced by multiple frames of meaning, act at the intersection of different markets, move between registers of eligibility, compliance and profitability and, in doing so, use a wide range of economic and social practices. The chapter concludes by showing that contrary to the effects anticipated by the EU bureaucrats, this type of funding does not fundamentally change the practices of doing business in Romania, but leads instead to emerging syncretic cultures of entrepreneurship.
Bratu offers the necessary theoretical lenses for analysing EU funding by critically pulling together three strands of literature. The first one looks at modes of coordination in economic life. The second regards new technologies of governing promoted in relationship to development, ‘modernisation’, Europeanisation and international aid. The third strand reviews the post-socialist transformations and the role of formal-informal relationships in the contemporary society. In the end, she conceptualises European Union (EU) funding as a mode of coordinating economic and social life that aims to accommodate transnational regulations with vernacular economic practices. Local actors, endowed with entrepreneurial practical competence, transform this arena through hybrid activities that break the imagined boundaries between legality, morality and legitimacy.
Complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs), here broadly intended as all those healthcare approaches developed outside standard science-based medicine, are increasingly the object of highly polarized public debates. Some CAMs can cause great social harm, with serious repercussions both on the health of people and on their confidence in the medical profession and the scientific method. This notwithstanding, criminologists have so far overlooked this issue. Based on the awareness that people’s perceptions of CAMs often depend on what they learn about them through the media, this exploratory study presents a longitudinal systematic analysis of media representations of CAMs in the Italian press. The results indicate that media have conveyed confused and ambivalent messages on the topic of CAMs, partly because of the lack of preparation of journalists on this subject and partly because of the insubstantial presence of the voices of experts and medical organizations in the press discourse. In addition, the study identifies avenues for further criminological research on this topic.
Money laundering control is a complicated exercise that is not particularly well served by unequivocal assertions about its pernicious impacts. Drawing on the legendary demise of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International and four modern American tales of disciplinary action, this paper examines the threatening relationship between money laundering and financial institutions. Located in the context of the evolution of money laundering regulation, the examination finds that neither of the factual narratives confirm that money laundering necessarily harms banks. Having identified an ambivalent relationship, the paper recommends enhanced focus on individual liability as a locus for the control of money laundering.
Can criminologists throw any light on corporate accountability? How realistically can organizational responsibility before the law be compared with that of individuals?
We investigate the corruption contagion phenomenon using both the spatial econometric model as well as the dynamic panel GMM approach, employing data on 109 countries from 2002 to 2013. The Moran index supports the spatial corruption autocorrelation among sample countries, while the Moran scatter clearly plots a positive relationship between national corruption and corruption of that country’s neighbors. Our empirical evidence not only confirms contagious corruption through geographic boundaries in our sample countries, but that it also spreads out even for countries having similar levels of GDP per capita and democratic institutions. The policy implication is that controlling corruption is not just the responsibility of a specific country, but also a part of synergistic governance worldwide. We also note that similar degrees of income levels and political systems actually play an important role in corruption diffusion, but traditional works unfortunately ignore them.
Today, values hold a prominent place both in business ethics and in organization theory. However, there persists considerable confusion about what these values are and what role they play in these theories and, therefore, how they can be developed both within the individual and within the organization. Therefore, this paper seeks to define a conception of values based on a theory of human action that can provide a basis for an organization theory, and to propose a series of ideas about how personal and organizational values can be fostered.
This chapter uses the organising theme of crime and work connections to develop an understanding of criminal activity and its location or siting. In particular, the chapter focuses upon one location or site of criminal activity: the workplace. Criminal acts can be seen to thrive at the junctures between the legitimate and illegitimate. What is more, they not only thrive at the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate but also within and between the formal and informal settings. The workplace is seen as hiding several forms of criminal activity, often ‘dressing up’ activities as acceptable business practice. In other instances the activities in the workplace are approaching the illegitimate and are near illegal but are nevertheless visible practices, often excused or rationalised as ‘perks of the job’. The chapter also evaluates the usefulness of the concept of work for understanding some types of crimes committed for economic gain. The crime-and-work connection also points to the ways in which crimes may be understood by those seeking to explain the behaviour and activities. It is argued that explanations of such crimes might more fully appreciate the offender’s perspective.
White-collar crime is invisible in many different respects. Offences are typically concealed within occupational and organisational routines, are difficult to detect by victims, observers or law enforcers, and few offenders are tried and sentenced in open court. It is also absent from public and academic discussions of ‘crime’ and criminal justice policy. A major theme in research and literature has therefore been to expose the extent, impact and failure to fully criminalise the crimes of ‘the powerful’. This chapter will focus on some key themes and issues which continue to be significant for understanding white-collar crime. It will argue that despite an apparent increase in offending it is still necessary to render white-collar crime more visible. It will then explore the extent to which the concept itself requires modification, particularly by focusing more directly on the nature of offences than on the status of offenders. This directs attention to aspects of victimisation and the relationship between white-collar crime and both legal and illegal forms of business activity and organisation. This will be explored by looking at who suffers and who benefits from white-collar crime, an exercise which also raises issues about the close relationships between white-collar and organised crime. Finally, the chapter will briefly outline some major questions dominating discussions of how this vast group of offences can be controlled.
Despite the ubiquity of illegality in today’s financial markets and the questions this raises with regard to the social legitimacy of today’s financial industry, systematic scrutiny of the phenomenon of financial crime is lacking in the field of sociology. One field of research in which the illegal dimensions of capitalist dynamics have long taken center stage is the field of white-collar crime research. This article makes available to economic sociologists an overview of the most important conceptual insights generated in the white-collar crime literature. In doing so, its aim is to provide economic sociologists with some orientation for future research on financial crime. Building on the insights generated in wcc literature, the article concludes by suggesting a number of promising avenues for future sociological research on the phenomenon of illegality in financial markets.
In this chapter I emphasize the usefulness of sociological and criminological theoretical approaches to help explain corruption. This chapter therefore draws on the sociology/criminology literature, placing corruption into a social and political context which highlights the complex nature of what ‘corruption’ is or how it is defined and viewed depending on the academic discipline. In attempting to define any concept, act or term and articulate it in such a way that it is understood, particularly for those unfamiliar with the field of study, is a difficult task. This is particularly so with corruption (Heywood 2015). Any definition, as noted by Philp (2015), can have two elements: it can articulate the import and use of a word, and it can act as a tool to help explain its meaning; the social sciences are primarily concerned with the latter. Understood as a tool, a definition aims to identify a set of criteria that suggests necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to occur. These criteria, however, differ depending on the focus of the discipline and also the theoretical approach.
Ozet En genel anlamda ic guvenlikten sorumlu olan kolluk gorevlilerinin, gerek ceza-adalet sistemi (CAS) icindeki adli gorevlerini yaparken gerekse ic guvenlik sistemi (IS) kapsamindaki asayisle ilgili idari gorevlerini yerine getirirken durust olmasi ve durust kalmasi toplumsal huzur, guven ve adaletin saglanmasi ve korunmasi acisindan buyuk onem tasimaktadir. Bu kadar onemli bir calisma alaninda Turkiye’de yapilan akademik arastirmalarin uluslararasi literaturle kiyaslandiginda cok az oldugu gozlenmektedir. Bu makalede ilk olarak, kolluk gorevlileri tarafindan islenmesi muhtemel ve literaturde beyaz yaka suc turu olarak siniflandirilan sapma davranisinin uluslararasi literature gore nasil bir siniflandirilmaya tabi tutuldugu ve bu tur suclarin nedenlerinin neler olabilecegi uzerinde durulacaktir. Daha sonra, gelismis ulkelerde kolluk gorevlilerinin gosterdigi sapma davranislarinin onlenmesi icin gelistirilen ve uygulanan stratejilere deginilecektir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Kriminoloji, Polislik, Polis Suclari, Polis Etigi, Suc Onleme, Yolsuzluk
This chapter starts by considering the extensive debate as to whether or not Marx had a theory of justice. Although there are some good reasons for thinking that he did not, there are very powerful reasons for thinking that contemporary socialists do need a theory of justice. Over and above these, there are yet further reasons for anyone aspiring to develop a Marxist theory of criminology to make use of conceptions of justice, and, indeed, to have conceptions of criminal justice. These conceptions form a significant underpinning of the study of corporate and white-collar crime, which has been an area where Marxist criminologists have joined in a very important academic and public enterprise. They are also relevant to the issue of whether some more plebeian crimes can be regarded as forms of primitive rebellion, prefiguring more political activities. Finally there is the issue of whether trade union and socialist political activity has sometimes to engage in crime.
The harms generated by business activity are undeniable and their persistence, despite efforts at their control, striking. Criminologists, amongst others, have documented the range of these harms from financial (Snider 2007), to the deaths and injuries of workers (Tombs and Whyte 2007) and of the public (Hutter 2001), devastation of the environment (Beirne and South 2007), the abuse of market system ideals through insider trading (Polk and Weston 1990, cf. Bhidé 2009) and market manipulation (Punch 1996). The focus of this chapter is to analyse critically the possibilities of control and reduction of these harms by placing them in their economic and political context. It argues that control measures are best understood when framed not only around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which they explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should influence business behaviour and the institutional conditions under which business activity occurs.
Research conducted within the discipline of criminology has been relatively blind to corporate and white-collar crime, a myopia that has remained even in the face of overwhelming evidence that in both Britain and in the United States of America the social and economic impact of corporate and white-collar crimes upon their victims massively exceeds the corresponding impact of conventional crimes.1 This last fact is acknowledged inmuch contemporary criminology, though such acknowledgment tends to appear somewhat gesturally, as if mere recognition of the existence of corporate and white-collar crimes is enough to bolster the integrity of criminological research. The truth of the matter is that, despite such token recognition of the crimes of the powerful, criminological research rarely takes these types of offenses and offenders as an object of study.
This chapter reviews the literature on police violence, concentrating on studies of police violence in some western democracies, especially the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia; as well as in other less-developed democratic countries, in Latin America and Africa. The Mumbai police is situated within this wider literature and various models (individual, situational, organisational and structural) to explain the causes of police violence, that are relevant to the situation in Mumbai are discussed. The “moral dilemma” that arises in situations that call for solutions to a “means-and-ends” problem is explored. The content and nature of policing is intrinsically linked to the use of force, and in many countries has been associated with some form of racial discrimination. The situation in India, and Mumbai, in particular, is more nuanced, in that, the use of deadly force by the police is allegedly directed against “hardened criminals”, but the police are often accused of mainly targeting criminals belonging to a minority ethnic community.
In the fourth chapter, we first analyze the distribution chains composed by legal and illegal suppliers of doping products in Italy, noting that the length of the chain and the legal status of the transactions vary depending on the products exchanged. Given the embeddedness of many supply-side activities in legitimate professions and exchanges, we then argue that the relationships the suppliers develop with each and their customers can often be subsumed under the broad category of white-collar crime. Tout court illegal enterprises also emerge, though, particularly among the suppliers dealing with substances that are illegally manufactured for doping purposes. Although the chapters only analyze empirical data on Italy, the findings here presented can be considered illustrative of the market for doping products in other countries, which have yet not been studied empirically. Future projects are called to ascertain empirically similarities and differences between the Italian market and what remains unexplored elsewhere.
Purpose
– This paper aims to focus on corruption and misconduct evidenced from local government investigation reports in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Design/methodology/approach
– A corruption and misconduct taxonomy was developed and the audit committee’s role was empirically tested.
Findings
– The empirical findings exhibited low support for audit committees overseeing corruption and misconduct allegations. The respondents generally considered that the chief executive was the appropriate person to manage investigations.
Practical implications
– The findings from the local government investigations and the empirical research emphasises the significance of culture and ethical practices to mitigate against corruption and misconduct. A culture of zero tolerance of corruption and misconduct was one of the best ways of a council demonstrating its integrity.
Originality/value
– This paper offers a local government perspective on the behavioural factors which provide the organisational conditions for corruption and misconduct to become the norm.
Misbehavior is ubiquitous. Its occurrence stretches back in time and shows little sign of abating. According to Richards (2008, pp. 653–654), organizational misbehavior “has been a prominent feature of organizational studies throughout the twentieth century and continues to command similar attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” Early interest has been traced back to F. W. Taylor's criticisms of workers’ restriction of output (Taylor, 2003) in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a phenomenon also considered by Donald Roy (1952, 1959) after World War Two, and subsequently extended by Jason Ditton (1977) and Gerald Mars (1982) to include workplace crimes such as “fiddles and theft.” In more recent times, such fiddles have been extended to the study of “cyberslacking” (Block, 2001), “cyberloafing” (Lim, 2002), and general workplace internet misuse (Lara, Tacoronte, Ding, & Ting, 2006). Yet, despite such interest in “organizational misbehavior,” the scholarship in this field is relatively recent and generally traced back to the work of Vardi and Wiener (1996) and Ackroyd and Thompson (1999).
The subprime mortgage crisis which was caused to a large degree by questionable mortgage lending and securitization practices that were furthered by deregulatory policies devastated the economy, led to large scale unemployment, and caused the foreclosure of millions of homes. There is evidence that numerous mortgage companies, financial firms, rating agencies, and high-level professionals were involved in unethical and often fraudulent business practices leading to the most severe economic meltdown since the Great Depression. In spite of the great economic and social harm, there was a lack of criminal sanctions against those companies and individuals, who were involved in creating the crisis that reached even global dimensions. This article analyses the reasons for and the possible social impacts of the lack of criminal sanctions against those who crossed the line between unethical and criminal business practices.
Such statements now seem commonplace to the student of white-collar and corporate crime, yet these were penned not long after Edwin Sutherland defined white-collar crime as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation,”3 and long before the term “corporate crime” became normal usage in criminology. Written in 1944 and 1947, respectively, they refer to the difficulties of understanding and judging the international crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II—acts we now know as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, although then the terminology was slightly different. For the purpose of this article, I shall use the term “international crimes” as synonymous with the three categories in current use.
This chapter explores historical origins of business related crime, to get a better understanding of the historical context of the involvement of corporations in transnational crime, which is often presented as a recent product of globalization. Often, globalization is presented as a cause for (the observed increase of) transnational corporate crime. However, the historical cases discussed in this chapter show that early accounts of corporate crime were also transnational. This raises the questions whether globalization is new and whether it is the cause of a transnationalization of corporate crime. This chapter discusses some historical—pre-World War II—accounts of business related crime, to illustrate that it is not a strictly contemporary phenomenon. Second, corporate complicity to transnational organized crime will be discussed, as the latter seems a product of the twentieth century. Third, several contemporary forms of corporate transnational crime and corporate complicity to organized crime are discussed to further illustrate the blurrification of corporate and organized crime: money laundering, corruption, environmental crime, and gross human rights violations. The chapter concludes with the lessons history teaches about the transnationality of corporate crime and recommendations for future research.
Not only football is one of the world's most popular sports, but it is also a multi-billion euro global business. Due to its large turnover, football may offer the stage for the commission of a wide variety of misconducts and corrupt activities. Progressively over the last decade, Italian football has severely suffered from a number of corruptive malpractices, in some cases also perpetrated with the aid of organised crime groups. A number of scandals have been put under the spotlight of public opinion, such as the ones of Calciopoli (“City of Football”) and of Calcio scommesse (“Football Bets”). In all, the search for profit seemed to have pushed the game into the background, and from the law enforcement investigations a widespread culture of illegality has emerged. Despite attracting a great deal of media attention and public demise, corrupt practices perpetrated within or through football organisations have seldom been analysed by scholars against the backdrop of relevant criminological perspectives. By drawing on documentary sources (judicial files and media news), this paper shall (1) categorise and describe different modalities and patterns of corrupt deals in the Italian football; (2) examine the findings through relevant criminological theories; and (3) identify systemic opportunities for corruption.
At least since Sutherland’s pathbreaking publication in 1949,1 American social science has had to conjure with the phenomena of “white-collar crime.” If not quite reluctantly, it did so only haltingly in the quarter century following Sutherland’s strong lead. Subsequent work was impeded by a combination of political disinterest in (even disdain for) the topic, the consequent lack of federal agency funds for research on it, and the focus of criminologists’work on rapidly rising rates of street crime in the United States.2
The social importance of corruption and its complex nature have led management scholars to study the phenomenon. However, they have largely ignored the research conducted by anthropologists on the matter. The aim of this article is to provide a critical review of the anthropological literature on corruption in relation to the management science research. Anthropology offers valuable insights into the understanding of the study of corruption. The field provides new perspectives particularly in relation to the definition of the concept, the morality of corruption, the processual approach, the methods of inquiry, and the holistic perspective. Management research can gain important insights from the results of ethnographic investigations that support the idea that the great diversity in the practices of corruption worldwide is imbued with the particular cultural and social implications of this phenomenon.
The corporation is implicated in a wide range of activities that are profoundly deleterious to human well-being. The Holocaust, as organized and carried out by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP; the Nazis), is arguably the outstanding example of organized malevolence in modern times. Beginning with the realization that the corporation and the Holocaust are both organizational phenomena, the present research mines a wide range of literature on the Holocaust and the corporation to identify similar practices and then analyzes those practices to discern how they contributed to the Holocaust and may contribute to the various adverse consequences associated with the corporation. Important similarities are identified and analyzed in respect of organization; relationship to unskilled and low-skilled labor; the involvement of professionals, scientists, and engineers; the pervasive use of secrecy and deception; and fascism. These similarities produce their adverse effects both individually and collectively. Collectively, they disempower or eliminate potential countervailing forces and thereby augmented the capacity of the NSDAP, in one case, and may augment the capacity of the corporation, in the other, to carry out destructive acts.
In an ideal textbook world, the noble concept of sustainable development sounds less complex and more feasible to actualize. Nevertheless, the fierce scramble to appear socially responsible also involves sophisticated corporate ingenuity characterized by deviance (Cohen, 1966), which is aimed mostly at rent seeking without regard to social and environmental issues, especially in weaker institutions. Institutional theory has thus far proved very valuable in providing insights into the reasons why the rules of the international business game, with multinational companies (MNCs) as major players, are applied differently in different institutional environments, resulting in different outcomes. It is easier to identify the functions of institutions than the structure they should take in specific contexts. The available literature and conventional knowledge about institutions have mostly been developed in the West, where the judicial, socioeconomic and political systems are generally formalized, stable, advanced and diverse. From theory to practice, this has led to the general assumption that the first best practices of the West should also be easily enforceable elsewhere in the developing world (Rodrik, 2008). From the start of the millennium, however, economic crises and emerging opportunities have highlighted the importance of the developing economies (DEs). First, they are potential markets notwithstanding the fundamentally different challenges they pose. Secondly, the institutional structures underpinning the rules of the game for their sustainable development are susceptible to analysis using the ‘second best perspective’ (Rodrik, 2008).
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