Corporate crime and punishment: The role of status and ideology

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to understand the inconsistency in punishment for corporate crime. Specifically focus is on explaining the variation in reaction to organizational misconduct by social control agents. Social control agents are societal actors endowed by the state or by the public at large to enforce the norms and rules and to sanction the violators. The first chapter of the dissertation explains why it is difficult to punish high-status organizations for their misconduct, and how the eruption of a widespread scandal creates an opportunity for social control agents such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to punish – and possibly weed out – the high-status fraudulent organizations. The second chapter explains how the ideology of news organizations and its (mis)alignment with the ideology of the fraudulent organizations influence the extent to which a fraudulent organization receives negative news coverage. Finally, the third chapter explicates how the negative characterization of an organization in the eyes of the focal news organization’s ideology influences the extent to which the news organization stigmatizes this organization during a scandal. Overall, the dissertation speaks to the research that seeks to understand the variation in audiences’ reaction to organizational misconduct, and it seeks to explain the role of status, and of ideology in explicating why social control agents attend to some instances of organizational misconduct and not to others.