Abstract
This paper seeks to develop the principal concerns of the state-corporate crime literature by drawing connections between two incidents that occurred 15 months apart: the sinking of the oil tanker the Prestige in Galicia in November 2002 and the killing of 24 Chinese migrant workers at Morecambe Bay in the North West of England in February 2004. It begins by introducing the key features of the two cases, before exploring how they might be described and understood as state-corporate crimes. It then identifies a tendency within the literature to analyse state-corporate crimes as ‘moments of rupture’ in the regulatory relationship. Seeking to move beyond such ‘moments of rupture’, the paper argues for an understanding of regulatory relationships as part of a broader regime of permission that seeks the smooth and uninterrupted accumulation of capital. It thus identifies the ‘process’ that must be analysed as a process of capital accumulation. This process is illustrated by focussing on the spheres of production and distribution in this story of capital accumulation. In the course of describing the complex ‘regime of permission’, the paper uncovers a structure of impunity that generally enables the most powerful architects and beneficiaries of state-corporate crime to sustain a process of capital accumulation.
Highlights
Studies in state-corporate crime, organised around a growing and relatively new agenda in corporate crime research, take the on-going and often symbiotic relationship between state/ public actors and private actors as the point of departure for its analysis (Kramer et al 2002)
This paper seeks to develop the principal concerns of the state-corporate crime literature by drawing connections between two incidents that occurred 15 months apart: the sinking of the oil tanker the Prestige in Galicia in November 2002 and the killing of 24 Chinese migrant workers at Morecambe Bay in the North West of England in February 2004
In the course of describing the complex ‘regime of permission’, the paper uncovers a structure of impunity that generally enables the most powerful architects and beneficiaries of state-corporate crime to sustain a process of capital accumulation
Summary
Studies in state-corporate crime, organised around a growing and relatively new agenda in corporate crime research, take the on-going and often symbiotic relationship between state/ public actors and private actors (normally large corporations) as the point of departure for its analysis (Kramer et al 2002). The description of our cases above provides the basis for launching an exploration of state-corporate crimes as events that are produced as part both of a more generalized set of social relationships, and a broader system of economic production We say this because the most apparent link across those cases seems to be that they are ‘‘crimes of the economy’’ (Ruggiero 2013) in the sense that their circumstances are rooted in a classical political economy understanding of the human consequences of shifts in the forces of supply and demand that are shaped and co-ordinated in a global economy. It is this understanding of the regulatory process that constitutes a primary example of the tendency to abstract social relationships that those previous critiques have identified
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