Criminology and the sociology of organizations

The sociology of organizations offers conceptual tools that can be used bycriminologists. The logic of crossing intra-disciplinary boundaries to borrowconceptual tools rests in the analogical properties of structure and processacross social settings that are fundamental aspects of all social organization.Analogy itself is underrecognized and used as a tool for conceptual thinkingand analysis in sociology. In this article, I give examples of theories andconcepts from the sociology of organizations that can usefully be appliedto substantive criminological problems. Then I compare family violence andcorporate crime as examples of organizational misconduct, foregroundingthe organizational setting in order to examine links between micro-, meso-,and macro-levels of analysis. These two exercises demonstrate thatincorporating organization theory into criminological research can providenew insights in data analysis of substantive problems, build toward generalsociological theory, and toward integrative general criminological theorythat escapes the levels of explanation problem.     

'Settling Accounts' Revisited: Reconciling Global Norms with Local Agency

In the mid- to late-1980s, the discourse of transitional justicewas shaped above all by the experience of countries in LatinAmerica, where military forces continued to exercise autonomouspower even after ceding formal authority to democratically electedgovernments. In this setting, while human rights professionalsagreed that fledgling democracies should undertake prosecutionsin accordance with their international legal obligations, theywere divided over the question of whether further developmentof international obligations in respect of punishment was desirable.Nor was it clear what, precisely, international law alreadyrequired. Writing in the early 1990s, the author of this essay concludedthat States parties to certain international treaties were ingeneral required to prosecute specific crimes. More generally,she argued, wholesale impunity for atrocious crimes was generallyincompatible with States’ responsibility to ensure thatindividuals subject to their power enjoyed fundamental rights.But these duties, she wrote, should not be interpreted to requireaction incompatible with a nascent democracy's political orlegal capacity. In this essay, the author describes how her views have evolvedin the past 15 years. Noting that international legal normsagainst impunity have grown increasingly strong and arguingthat this trend has itself proved a powerful antidote to impunity,the author nonetheless affirms ‘the central importanceof promoting the broad participation of victims and other citizensin the process of designing as well as implementing programmesof transitional justice’ and addresses the inherent tensionbetween these values and norms.     

transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom: towards plan F—a feminist economic strategy

This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.