NCJ Number
99538
Journal
Law and Policy Volume: 7 Issue: 3 Dated: (July 1985) Pages: 315-343
Date Published
1985
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This paper examines how individual responsibility for organizational wrongdoing can be governed within corporate cultures and explores the problem of incompatibility between legal and organizational principles of responsibility.
Abstract
Much of the discussion is based on interviews with 30 head-office executives of 6 large Japanese corporations, as well as civil servants responsible for business regulation in 4 major ministries. Four intracorporate varieties of individual responsibility for organizational wrongdoing are reviewed. These are 'noblesse oblige,' where the organization's titular head assumes strict responsibility; 'captain of the ship responsibility,' where the senior officer at the site of wrongdoing is held responsible; 'nominated accountability,' where responsibility is on persons identified in advance as accountable for the types of actions at issue; and 'fault-based responsibility,' where responsibility is on those deemed most culpable. The discussion then turns to the divergence between legal and organizational principles of responsibility, followed by an assessment of four approaches for addressing this divergence. The approach most favored by the authors would allow corporations to propose their own principles of accountability as the basis for a pluralistic matching of legal principles and organizational cultures. The approach least favored would make both corporate and legal principles of accountability conform to some ethical canon. Twenty-six notes and 94 references are provided.