Corporate Deviance Research Articles

Killer Corporations: Changing Student Attitudes on Corporate Crime Using an In-Class Exercise

The purpose of this paper is to share a teaching exercise on corporate deviance and an assessment of its effectiveness. A pre/posttest survey was utilized to investigate the impact of the exercise on student attitudes concerning corporate deviance. In particular, the project was intended to teach students about the serious nature of corporate crimes. While Americans think corporate crime is a serious issue, they tend to resist giving harsh penalties to corporate criminals. This exercise illustrated that even when corporations commit serial murder, they often get light punishments compared to those individuals who have committed similar crimes. Ultimately, the purpose of the exercise was to illustrate the disparity in punishment for similar crimes. The assessment of the exercise indicated support for our hypotheses. There was an increase in the percentage of students that think corporate deviance should be treated more similarly to street crime from the pre to the posttest.

‘It could have been us’. Peer responses to money-laundering violations in the Dutch banking industry

Much literature has focused on societal responses to corporate scandals, either by authorities or the public. However, there is little research on responses to corporate deviance by peers (corporations in the same industry). As corporations face a Zeitgeist characterised by increased attention to, and disapproval of, corporate deviance, they are compelled to respond to the external ‘labelling’ of their behaviour, as well as that of their peers. In this context of increasing public scrutiny, this article explores how (employees at) corporations respond to deviant peer behaviour. To examine this question, the case study of non-compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in the Dutch banking industry is utilised. Six stages of peer interactions were identified, namely, panic and fear, comparing practices, distancing, investing, and cooperation and defiance. In these six stages, condemnation between peers is incidental and mainly functions as a tool to guard their reputation (defence mechanism). Peer responses are determined by characteristics of the act (severance of the violation), actor (comparability and identification as peers), the audience (type of enforcement and public attention), and the situation (knowledge on the violation). As AML cases spread become more frequent across the industry, defence mechanisms also expand, thereby resulting in cooperation between banks and defiance of regulators.

Sewing Responsibility: Media Discourse, Corporate Deviance, and the Rana Plaza Collapse

On the morning of April 24, 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight‐story building housing five garment factories collapsed killing 1,129 workers and injuring 2,500. It quickly emerged that U.S.‐ and European‐based retailers were sourcing items produced at Rana Plaza. This paper takes the Rana Plaza collapse as a case study of how media discourse constructs ideas about corporate deviance, responsibility, and risk management in the global supply chain. Guided by the crime news frame and global risk governance, newspaper articles from the U.S. and Bangladesh are used for a content analysis. This paper expands the literature of corporate crime and global risk governance to include the fast fashion industry. We find little evidence that either country discusses Rana Plaza as corporate deviance or the criminal condemnation of corporations. We find evidence that global risk governance is nationalized, as U.S. papers shift blame away from U.S. corporations and onto Bangladesh.

What’s in the Water? How Media Coverage of Corporate GenX Pollution Shapes Local Understanding of Risk

Media coverage of water pollution has been a topic of theoretical examination and empirical testing. Still, green criminologists have not fully explored issues relating to water pollution. This paper draws from the environmental literature on risk society and criminology’s crime news frame to explore media coverage of corporate deviance through the lens of green cultural criminology. A content analysis of local newspaper articles in a southeastern city analyzes constructions of corporate deviance, risk, and blame regarding the discovery of GenX. Results demonstrate how media discourse around risk and science plays an important role in shaping concerns about corporate environmental pollution. Magnification of risk and uncertainty draws the public’s attention to issues of regulatory enforcement and funding. At the same time, risk is minimized by corporate and regulatory officials who urge the public to wait for more research before introducing new laws and regulations while also individualizing the blame.

Corporate Governance and Banks’ Turmoils: Assessment of Shareholders Response

Cooperate governance is seen as the mechanism of control for harnessing the ugly face of bank turmoil’s. It can persuade, induce complete and motivate corporate managements in order to eliminate the corporate deviance and turmoil in the banks. It is a system and power for decision making, risk monitoring, setting of objectives and policies and the assessment of overall bank internal and external performance and control optimization. The study made use of secondary data obtained from 5 commercial banks on the assessment of their corporate board members. We subjected their responses on a 6-point Likert scale measurement into a Pearson Product Moment Correlation Test as well as t-test. The result of the findings revealed that good corporate governance of banks will reduced mistrust between shareholders and management but may not reduce the overall bank turmoil. This is because of other variables associated with bank turmoil’s. The study recommends that corporate governance can only prevent banking turmoil’s with adequate implementation of code of corporate governance for best practices in Banks, understanding and diligent discharged of responsibility in a prudent and transparent manner. Finally the study recommends that our banks board of directors and management team should be abreast with adequate, relevant and needed knowledge, experiences, professional skills, competences in order to remove in total the bank turmoils. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n8p39

Image construction versus empirical evaluations: automobile safety

The present study expands upon earlier work examining advertising as it relates to the construction of safety-related images in the automobile industry. Comparisons are made between automaker portrayal of vehicle safety in magazine advertising and their real-world safety-related performances. Such an analysis enables suggestions regarding, whether or not, the extent to which particular automakers demonstrate a misleading concern for safety and potentially produce false advertisements that violate the standards of law. In this sense, misleading claims related to automobile safety could be considered corporate deviance, particularly in relation to false advertising practices. This paper examines safety and vehicle marketing, a noted gap in recent literature, by looking at three magazine publications over the course of five years and comparing the marketing strategies and assessing the extent to which automaker crash test evaluations correspond with their socially constructed, safety-based image. Our findings suggest that automakers are largely accurate in their advertising practices with regard to promoting and supporting safety claims.

The Deviant Organization and the Bad Apple CEO: Ideology and Accountability in Media Coverage of Corporate Scandals

What role do the media play in the identification and construction of white-collar crimes? Few studies have examined media coverage of corporate deviance. This study investigates news coverage of six large-scale accounting scandals that broke in 2001 and 2002. Using a variety of empirical methods to analyze the 51 largest U.S. newspapers, the study tests several explanations for tendencies to run more or less coverage of the scandals in question. The study then examines the substantive focus of coverage. First, the results suggest that scandal coverage was influenced by the political ideology of newspapers, as opposed to economic interests or social structural ties between firms. Second, the analysis shows that attention to the adjudication of individual crimes and the punishment of individual offenders received the bulk of media attention.

Campaign contributions, lobbying and post‐Katrina contracts

This research explores the relationship between political campaign contributions, lobbying and post-Hurricane Katrina cleanup and reconstruction contracts. Specifically, a case-control study design is used to determine whether campaign contributions to national candidates in the 2000-04 election cycles and/or the employment of lobbyists and lobbying firms increased a company's probability of receiving a post-hurricane contract. Results indicate that both a campaign contribution dichotomous variable and the dollar amount of contributions are significantly related to whether a company received a contract, but that lobbying activity was not. These findings are discussed in the context of previous research on the politics of natural disasters, government contracting and governmental and corporate deviance.

Undeserved Loss: The Spread of Legitimacy Loss to Innocent Organizations in Response to Reported Corporate Deviance

This paper theorizes about why discoveries of corporate deviance that damage the legitimacy of the responsible organization may also have consequences for other organizations. We propose that audiences generalize from deviance by one organization to others that are similar. The result is a withdrawal from transactions even from non-culpable organizations as audiences seek to avoid organizations that they associate with a deviant act. We show that two scandals involving Skandia AB, a Swedish insurance firm that had a subsidiary offering mutual funds, affected mutual fund providers owned by other insurance firms in 2000–2004, as well as mutual fund subsidiaries of other firms with similar characteristics. The effect was greatest for firms more similar to Skandia and firms owning real estate, which was the context for one of the scandals. Thus audience members' categorization rules lead to spread of legitimacy loss in response to an isolated act of organizational deviance.

SOCIAL AND GOVERNMENTAL ALTRUSIM, DETERRENCE THEORY, AND NURSING HOME REGULATORY VIOLATIONS: A STATE-LEVEL ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT Explanations of corporate deviance have tended to focus on organizational characteristics with very little attention given to the influence of broader structural factors that enable or deter such activities. Recent macro level explanations of non-corporate crime by Cochran and Chamlin (1997) have focused on social altruism as a factor inhibiting violent and property crime rates. Such an approach directly complements Paternoster and Simpson's (1996) theory of corporate crime which focuses on both deterrence and appeals to morality. The current study uses state-level data to investigate the roles of social altruism, government altruism, and threat of punishment in deterring nursing home regulatory violations. Results suggest moderate support for these theories. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.

Differential association, multiple normative standards, and the increasing incidence of corporate deviance Inan era of globalization

This paper examines with the use of aggregate data from the U.S. Department of Justicethe extent of contemporary white-collar crime as a consequence of multiple normative standards existing within corporations. Given the implications of globalization, the desire for increased profits, and the declining role of regulatory agencies across much of the world (save for Europe, Japan, Mexico and India), paper suggests that the incidence of corporate deviance is likely to increase in the foreseeable future.

The pinto legacy: The community as an indirect victim of corporate deviance

In 1978, in Elkhart County Indiana, three teenage girls died following an “accident” in which their Ford Pinto was struck from behind and burst into flames. Two years later, in what has been described as a landmark case (Maakestad, 1987; Clinard, 1990; Frank and Lynch, 1992; Hills, 1987), a trial began in which the Ford Motor Company, as a result of this incident, found itself facing three charges of reckless homicide (State of Indiana v. Ford Motor Company, hereafter referred to as the Pinto Case). While this was not the first time an automobile manufacturer was faced with a potentially lethal faulty design (the Chevrolet Covair among others), it was the first case to result in a criminal homicide charge. The Pinto case has received considerable attention in the criminological and legal literature, ranging from journal articles (Clark, 1979; Swigert and Farrell, 1980–81; Wheeler, 1981), to discussions in textbooks (Albanese, 1995; Green, 1997), to books focusing on the case in varying degrees (Birsch and Fielder, 1994; Cullen et al., 1987; Strobel, 1980; Welty, 1982).

Socially constructing an image in the automobile industry

Due to its large-scale, often unrecognized effects, corporate deviance in America is a societal concern that demands further attention. The present research provides deeper insight into the area, with the hope of furthering our knowledge and ultimately reducing the problem. Among the measurements presented are: 1) the corporate image socially constructed by General Motors (GM); 2) the “safety” of GM vehicles; and 3) GM's constructed safety-related image compared against its actual performance. GM's image was measured through a content analysis of Newsweek and Motor Trend magazines, while GM's safety-related performance was measured using various vehicle crash test data. Through advertising and marketing strategies, the auto industry has approached the general public with an alleged commitment to automotive safety. The present research tested those commitments, and although determinations of guilt are beyond the scope of the present research (for reasons discussed in the text), several conclusions regarding involvement in corporate deviance are provided. Those conclusions are discussed in the context of how they relate to crime and the societal implications they present. Suggestions for future research are presented.

Trial by fire: Media constructions of corporate deviance*

Some scholars blame the low salience of corporate deviance on a lack of media coverage. Others claim that negative coverage might shame corporations into compliance with regulations. We examine how the news frame used to report corporate deviance affects issues of salience and regulation. We create a conceptual model of crime news frames and use it to analyze newspaper coverage of two instances of alleged corporate deviance: claims about the safety of GM trucks and an NBC Dateline program about the trucks. The coverage was shaped by the standard crime news frame, with its features of attribution and individualization of responsibility, maintenance of moral boundaries, and resolution. The reliance on this frame reinforced dominant ideological definitions of corporate deviance that perpetuate its low salience and limit the use of the media as a mechanism for inducing corporate compliance.

A Study of the Cultural Effects of Industry and Career Systems on Top Executive Perceptions of Ethical Problems

While practitioner workshops and academic courses on ethics and values have traditionally focused on individual frameworks, discussion of business ethics and values as a field of study within social deviance and management often stresses the important interaction between organizational culture and ethical practices, or context rather than character. However, research on this interaction is limited. This paper reports on a study examining the effect that two antecedents of organizational culture, industry and career systems, have on top executive perceptions of various ethical issues. Two of the top officers in each of fifty-two leading firms covering four service industry sectors were surveyed concerning their firm's career systems and their perceptions of the severity of several ethical problems. Results of the study provide descriptive information on the severity of ethical problems across industry sectors, and suggest that both industry and career systems affect the severity of ethical problems. Implications of this study can be applied to continued research on corporate deviance and managerial efforts to reinforce ethical conduct.

Outcomes of corporate greed.

This study is the context portion of a larger study that described the experience of 30 nurses in Texas, USA who worked in for-profit psychiatric hospitals during a documented period of corporate deviance. The objective of the contextual portion was to describe the major findings in 1991-1992 of investigating agencies that probed the scandal. Exploratory descriptive. Over 1,240 pages and 40 hours of corporate records obtained under subpoena, and written and oral testimony before the USA House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. Content analysis, triangulating sources, and comparing as well as cross-checking themes. Four themes: insurance games, dumping patients, patient abuse, and playing with language. Organizational deviance may become more widespread in profit-driven systems of care. Lobbying for whistleblower protection, collective advocacy, and creative educational reforms are used.

Dirty hands: the underside of marketplace health care.

The ethos of the corporation and the urgency for profit maximization place pressures on health care corporations to act in a way that may be incompatible with ethical practice. Profit-driven incentives often result in corporate deviance and criminal behavior. Nurses may be pressured to go along with schemes that may be unethical or illegal and because of shaky job markets may be unable to adhere to professional ethical guidelines. Recent events in health care are drawn on to argue that ethical theory and research must begin to consider the issue of moral compromise of professionals as a result of deviant organizational environments.

The corporate context of private prisons

This article deals with the growing interest in the privatization of correctional institutions. It focuses on the corporate context of this trend because modern privatization is being done by corporations which have been formed specifically for this purpose or are specialized subsidiaries of large conglomerates. The article reviews the theoretial, legal, political, regulatory, economic, management, and labor issues involved in corporate privatization, taking into consideration the aspects of organizational climate and corporate deviance. Finally, the article points out that corporate involvement in the private management of correctional facilities should be analyzed carefully and taken into consideration in the privatization debate.

European Arms Industries in the 1980s: A Study in Corporate Crime

U.S. scholarship on corporate and governmental illegality has often drawn examples from the U.S. defense industry, but comparative and international examples have not been widely used. European defense corporations have likewise been involved in extensive abuses and criminal activities, which have often involved the illegal export of weapons to prohibited destinations. This is illustrated by the massive sanctions violations perpetrated by arms manufacturers during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, when a clandestine corporate network emerged to meet the illicit demand for weapons. This study considers the economic and political roots of the widespread corporate deviance that was apparent in those years and further emphasizes the parallels between that situation and instances of organized or syndicate criminality.

Anomie and corporate deviance

This paper elaborates on Merton's theory of anomie, while aiming at the enhancement of our understanding of processes conducive to corporate deviance. It attempts to consolidate points made by theorists operating in diverse, often considered as conflicting, orientations or perspectives. A “synthetic” or “integrated scheme” is, thus, put forward, which can help appreciate the background against which corporate deviance is likely to occur. Moreover, it is argued that contemporary societies are inherently conducive to anomic trends. Such trends bring about not only lower-class deviance and crime — to which anomie theory has been traditionally applied — but also high-class and corporate deviance. Against claims by some scholars that the former is a matter of greater concern, it is suggested that the latter is at least as serious a problem and that it has significant implications for the social order.