Abstract
The economic, social, and human consequences of organizational wrongdoing are enormous and well-documented.1 The 21st century began with almost daily revelations about corporate and organizational misconduct, ranging from widespread economic abuses at Enron and other Fortune 500 corporations to human rights violations by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison. Most observers agree that the costs of “crime in the suites” far outweigh those of “crime in the streets.”2 But who, or what, is responsible for these harms? Should we blame greedy or morally negligent individuals, referred to as “amoral calculators”?3 Organizational cultures, structures, and processes?4 institutional logics and systemic environmental forces that transcend a “focal organization”?5 Broader social norms and institutions, such as capitalism or “technical rationality”?6 Or perhaps the very regulatory agencies charged with controlling organizational wrongdoing create criminogenic environments and deserve blame for placing organizations “beyond the law”?7 Because the state plays the inherently contradictory dual role of both promoting and regulating business corporations, some scholars have come to see corporate wrongdoing as arising from functional interdependencies between corporations and the state, giving rise to the term “state-corporate crime.”8 To what extent do different audiences (e.g., prosecutors, scholars, laypersons) believe that such systemic causes absolve individuals of legal or moral responsibility and under what conditions?
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Lee, M.T., Gailey, J.A. (2007). Attributing Responsibility for Organizational Wrongdoing. In: Pontell, H.N., Geis, G. (eds) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34111-8_3
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