Crime and Custom in Corporate Society: A Cultural Perspective on Corporate Misconduct

Abstract

We draw our title from Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Bronislaw Malinowski's 1926 study of law, deviance, and social control in the Trobriand Islands of the southwest Pacific.1 Malinowski, an Englishman born of Polish parents, was one of the inventors of modern ethnography, the anthropological practice of living among the people to be studied, participating in their culture, and trying to see the world though their eyes. (As with so many other inventions, this one had an accidental component: Malinowski's sojourn in the Trobriands was essentially a form of internment as a suspect alien during World War I.2) Although Malinowski's theoretical stance3 and reporting style4 now seem almost comically dated, Crime and Custom remains significant as the earliest effort to argue that societies lacking such Western trappings as judges, courts, and police can still have in a meaningful sense. Malinowski lacked a sense of that would be congenial to modern anthropologists and sociologists-indeed, as far as we can tell, the word culture does not appear in Crime and Custom-but he was, nonetheless, the first to take a cultural approach to law. The phenomenon that we in the West call is that set of cultural beliefs and practices that establishes norms for conduct, defines the limits of tolerable deviance, and decides how to deal with those who cross the line. Not only need law not take on the institutional form