Corporate Crime - An Organizational Perspective (From White-Collar and Economic Crime, P 75-94, 1982, Peter Wickman and Timothy Dailey, ed. - See NCJ-82224)

• NCJ Number: 82227
• Author(s): R C Kramer
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 20 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: Western Michigan University
• Sale Source: Lexington Books
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on White Collar and Economic Crime - Trends and Problems in Research and Policy - Multidisciplinary and Cross National Perspectives, Potsdam, New York, February 7-9, 1980.

Annotation

Organizational goals, organizational structure, and organizational environment are the major organizational factors that influence the commission of corporate crimes.

Abstract

Corporate crime is the illegal or socially harmful behavior that results from deliberate decisionmaking by corporate executives in accordance with the operative goals of their organizations. Previous theory and research on corporate crime, with its focus on social-psychological learning processes involving corporate executives, has suffered from an individualistic bias. Since corporate crime is organizational crime, its explanation calls for an organizational level of analysis. An analysis of corporate crime must begin with an examination of the nature of organizational goals and their consequences for organizational behavior. It is hypothesized that organizations, as arrangements committed to goal attainment, will engage in criminal behavior if they encounter serious diffculties in attaining their goals, especially profit goals. Product-characteristic goals may also help to shape the decisionmaking process that leads to corporate criminal acts. Further, an analysis of corporate crime must include an examination of the nature of the internal structure of the organization and the influence of this structure on organizational behavior. Itis hypothesized that the organizational structure may translate the abstract goals of the corporation into more specific subgoals, the attainment of which requires or leads to criminal behavior. Also, the decentralization of decisionmaking within the corporation makes illegal actions more likely. Organizational environment also influences corporate crime, as market conditions may operate as constraints on the attainment of corporate profit goals, pressuring corporations into illegal acts in the attempt to circumvent these constraints. Empirical support for the preceding hypotheses is found in a preliminary analysis of the Ford Pinto case. A total of 58 references and 3 notes are provided.