Taming Business? Understanding Effectiveness in the Control of Corporate and White-collar Crime

  • Fiona Haines
Chapter

Abstract

The harms generated by business activity are undeniable and their persistence, despite efforts at their control, striking. Criminologists, amongst others, have documented the range of these harms from financial (Snider 2007), to the deaths and injuries of workers (Tombs and Whyte 2007) and of the public (Hutter 2001), devastation of the environment (Beirne and South 2007), the abuse of market system ideals through insider trading (Polk and Weston 1990, cf. Bhidé 2009) and market manipulation (Punch 1996). The focus of this chapter is to analyse critically the possibilities of control and reduction of these harms by placing them in their economic and political context. It argues that control measures are best understood when framed not only around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which they explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should influence business behaviour and the institutional conditions under which business activity occurs.

Keywords

Multinational Enterprise Inside Trading Capitalist System Political Legitimacy Corporate Crime 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© The Author 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Fiona Haines
    • 1
  1. 1.University of MelbourneMelbourneAustralia

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