Corporate criminology: Explaining deviance of business and political organizations

Explanations of criminal behavior historically have focused on the behavior of individuals. The criminality of organizations, or corporate criminology, has only recently received systematic attention from researchers and policy makers. Four existing theories of organizational crime, and subsequent evaluations of their explanatory power, are comparatively assessed with special attention given to their implications for control strategies. It is suggested that strategies based on causal factors will achieve greater success than prevailing approaches to corporate criminality.     

Corporate environmental violence and racism

Drawing upon a social justice framework, this analysis expands and integrates issues relating to corporate violence and environmental justice to investigate the spatial distribution of chemical accidents across census tracts in Hillsborough County, Florida. To test the hypothesis that corporate environmental violence (CEV) is more likely to impact blacks and Hispanics, data from the 1990 census was combined with chemical accident data obtained from the U.S. EPA under the Accidental Release Information Program (ARIP). The results of our bivariate analysis suggest that blacks and Hispanics reside closer to chemical facilities reporting accidents than their white counterparts. A multivariate analysis of the problem reveals that racial sub-populations are much more likely to be proximate to these accidents even when facility location and urbanization are controlled. We discuss the implications of our findings and point out that any solutions to the unequal distribution of CEV must lie outside the traditional criminal justice response. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Postmodern criminology in relation to radical and conflict criminology

The literature on postmodern criminology suggests that there is some relationship between it and radical criminology. This relationship apparently is based in part on the ract that both are further related to conflict theory. However, conceptual analyses on these types of theories have not fully explicated whatever similarities and differences exist among them. This essay identifies six core theoretical assertions in conflict criminology and compares them to parallel assertions in radical and postmodern criminology. Such comparison is followed by a discussion on the relevance of conflict and radical theory as conceptual backdrops from which to comprehend postmodern inquiry.     

Imperialism, crime and criminology: Towards the decolonisation of criminology

Cohen (1988) once concluded that it is ironic that critics in the West are identifying forms of social control that are more traditional in the Third World as better alternatives to the neo–classical and positivistic repressive traditions in the West while some suggest that what they found malignant in the West should be exported to the Third World as benign. In this paper, I am going beyond Western crime control models to examine the character of criminology itself as an imperialist science for the control of others.     

Corporate social responsibility as new challenge for the IT industry

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a relevant topic for enterprises offering products and services on a global scale. International organizations provide for guidelines and private associations publish codes of conduct requiring businesses to integrate social, environmental and ethical aspects, human rights as well as consumer concerns into their operations. Not at least the EU is promoting CSR through an Agenda for Action 2011–14. The implementation of CSR is a multidimensional ethical process and gains particular importance for the IT industry which by its nature is global. Therefore, IT enterprises are invited to conduct a CSR assessment, to develop a CSR strategy and to implement CSR commitments. These tasks are to be done by introducing specific CSR processes and compliance measures for risk assessment and risk mitigation.     

Rethinking critical criminology

This paper takes the form of a report on the panel discussion held at the conclusion of the 1992 meetings of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control in Padua in September 1992. In the light of a perceived crisis of relevance for earlier, 1970s notions of critique in criminology, and in the context of a conference dedicated to the theme of human rights in a uniting Europe, eight panellists from Italy, England, and Canada via Ireland debated their different versions of the project of critical criminology in the last years of the twentieth century. Each of these presentations is summarised here, and an attempt is made to recognise the emergence of a debate between a human rights criminology, eversensitive to the possibilities of repression and control in Fortress Europe, and an alternative perspective, predicated perhaps on some notion of Social Defence and a realist programme of crime prevention and control across free market Europe.     

Cultural relativism and comparative criminology

The recent spate of comparative studies of crime is long overdue as a potential palliative to the traditional ethnocentrism of American criminology. But their comparative method is uncritically taken from two incompatible propositions derived from Durkheimian empiricism. As such, the generalizations about criminal behavior that these studies advance should be treated more with caution than optimism. This essay discusses the alleged advances over Durkheimian empiricism made by two distinct forms of cultural relativism. If what every man believes as a result of perception is indeed to be true for him; if, just as no one is to be a better judge of what another experiences, so no one is better entitled to consider what another thinks is true or false... then, my friend, where is the wisdom of Protagoras, to justify his setting up to teach others and to be handsomely paid for it? Socrates, in Plato'sTheaetetus     

再论刑事法学领域的科际整合--从犯罪学的学科定位角度

我国目前的刑事法学内部存在很大的体系混乱现象.本文提倡科际整合,以明确各学科在刑事法学科体系中的定位,为学术交流创造更方便、规范的环境,进而推动刑事法学的发展.     

Biosocial criminology and modern crime prevention

Objective

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, criminological efforts to prevent or reduce crime were centered on addressing presumed biological causes of crime. Most of these strategies involved calls for eugenics—proposals that today are considered unethical and morally reprehensible. Biologically-oriented criminology and crime control policies have re-emerged with new sophistication and attention to the importance of social context. Additionally, developmental crime prevention, with a special focus on biological/physiological risk factors in the early life course, has become influential in criminology. This paper examines the relevance of biology to modern day crime prevention.

Materials and methods

Narrative review of the theoretical and empirical literature of biology and developmental crime prevention.

Results

There are a growing number of developmental crime prevention programs that address biological risk factors for delinquency and later criminal offending. These programs are found in the family, school, and community domains. Evidence suggests that these programs can reduce crime.

Conclusions

While “biological crime prevention” as a separate field has not yet emerged, findings show that crime prevention programs can and do address biology in a sociologically sensitive manner—and these programs have shown significant impacts on crime.     

Politics and ethics in cultural criminology

This essay offers both a critique of the theory and practice of criminology and an alternative programme via a sketch of a cultural criminology utilising cultural and literary analysis. The first part of the essay calls for the problematisation of the issues of value and representation in the criminological project and offers a competing account of the theoretical basis of the project of criminology based upon a cultural politics of difference and the ethics of radical alterity. The second part of the essay is a demonstration of how this theoretical basis might operate in practice through a cultural criminological reading of Maurice Blanchot's novelThe Most High (1948, 1996). This novel is an account of the relationship between language and transgression in a totalitarian society at the end of history. An alteration in the discursive practices of the criminological project premised upon a competing theoretical perspective suggests that criminology (specifically the relation between law and transgression, deviancy and regulation) can become an important element in explanations regarding the organisation and disorganisation of contemporary urban culture utilising the strengths of its prior application (specifically narratology) and abandoning its fear of culture.     

Rethinking organizational crime and organizational criminology

Organizational crime and organizational criminology, obviously, are, orshould be about ``organization'. This essay wants to explore what is goingon in contemporary ``organizations'; it wants to think through what iscurrently happening in today's organizations. It will argue thatcontemporary organizational life has arrived in a phase of transition.New forms, and new modalities of organizational morality are taking shape.So is organizational regulation. This, as will hopefully become clear, is ofimportance to organizational criminologists who, inevitably, though oftenimplicitly, have been researching and writing about organizational orbusiness ethics and morality for some time now. This essay suggests analternative way of conceptualizing life and regulation in contemporaryorganizations. It suggests a reading of contemporary organizations as clustersof labyrinthine networks – i.e. the raw materials and again the outcome oflabyrinthine moralities – in which – as Deleuze and Guattari had it – theOutside is always already potentially, though undecidably,Within. To students of organizational regulation, and organizationalcriminologists are amongst them, this essay argues that contemporaryorganizations are gradually turning into highly complex networks (of networks) thatare often inextricably interwoven with surrounding networks. This has aprofound impact on how organizational moralities emerge and develop, onon how these in turn impact on the contents and the orientation oforganizational action. This essay will argue that regulating contemporaryorganizatons is bound to be simultaneously much easier as well as muchmore complex than in a previous, ``bureaucratic' age.     

Ideology and relative autonomy in anglo-canadian criminology

This paper examines the concepts of ideology and relative autonomy as they have been applied in critical Canadian criminology. It is argued that criminologists have oversimplified the relationship between criminal law and state structure in Canada: first, because of their general failure to recognize that intensifying crime control is consensus-promoting, not consensus-threatening, since criminal law and the criminal justice system do not occupy the same position in relation to legitimation processes as do other institutions of the welfare state, such as education and health care; second, because they have assumed a necessary relationship between relative autonomy and the liberalization of criminal justice systems. We need to specify more carefully which types of reform threaten dominant classes and which are irrelevant to them.