Organizational Crime : Its Concept and Theoretical Analysis

Abstract

Recently, it appears that the serious illegal acts committed by organizations, including pollution, briberies, unsafe products, false advertising, price fixing, and spying, have increased. In the sociology of crime, these acts have been studied through the concept of 'white-collar crime' which was introduced by Sutherland in 1941. However, this concept is inadequate for dealing with the illegal acts of organizations in terms of content and terminology. Further, it is problematic that most of the studies of 'white-collar crime' have employed Sutherland's theory of differential association as an explanation of the crime.By these reasons, it is desirable to use the concept of organizational crime for the analysis of illegal organizational acts, instead of white-collar crime.In the case of an organizational crime, the criminal agents are not individuals, but the organization itself, because an organization is more of a collection of positions than that of members. Therefore, organizational theory can provide the framework for an understanding of how the properties of organizations relate to their crimes. In this paper, organizational crime is considered by the multistrata system model of organizations, which is composed of three action systems (economic system, political system and construction-building system), mediated by two institutional systems (organizational program and organizational constitution). So, the organizational crime can be regarded as a kind of an organizational program from this viewpoint. Thus, by dividing the process of program adoption into four phases (disclosure, decision, implementation and institutionalization), how the organizational properties cause organizational crimes in each phase may be examined.