White collar and corporate crime Flashcards
Occupational crime
-Crime committed by the employee for their own personal gain, e.g. stealing from the company
Corporate crime
-Crime committed by the employee FOR their company, in the pursuit of achieving its goals e.g. purposefully mis-selling products to increase company profits
Pearce and Tombs (2003)
-Define corporate crime as an illegal act OR the failure to act when something is deliberately done to benefit the company
Tombs (2013)
-The scale of corporate crime is ‘widespread, routine and pervasive’
-It has enormous costs such as deaths/illnesses, environmental pollution and economic
Financial crime
-Tax evasion, fraud, money laundering
-Victims often include companies, taxpayers etc
Crimes against consumers
-False labelling, + selling unfit products
-2011, the French govt recommended that women with breast implants from the company Poly Implant Prothese, have them removed as they were filled with dangerous silicone rather than medical grade silicone
Crimes against employees
-Sexual + racial discrimination, violation of wage laws e.g. Woods et al, did a study where they change the names of CVs to stereotypical ethnic names and found that ones with stereotypical white names got more responses
-Palmer (2008)- estimates that occupational diseases caused 50,000 deaths a year in the UK
Crimes against the environment
-Illegal pollutions of air, water and land such as toxic waste dumping
-2015, VW admitted to installing software in 11 million of its vehicles globally which disguised emission levels that were 40 times above the US legal limit
State-corporate crime
-Harms committed when govt and businesses cooperate to pursue their goals e.g. Baroness Mone who received over £200m in covid govt contracts from the company PPE MedPro
-E.G. Hancock who sold multi-million pound contracts to his friend
Abuse of trust- an explanation for why corporate crime can happen so easily
Carrabine et al (2014):
-We entrust high-status professionals but they can use their position to abuse this trust
-2000- GP Harold Shipman was convicted of the murder of 15 of his patients but was believed to have murdered at least 200 more
-1976- Shipman had been convicted for obtaining a powerful opiate through deception and forgery, then within that same year obtained enough morphine to kill 360 people
BUT he was only given a warning and was allowed to continue as a GP
Invisibility of corporate crime ( an explanation for why corporate crime can happen so easily)- the media
-Controlled by the bourgeoisie who won’t publish news that could expose them
-Describe corporate crime using sanitised language such as technical infringement rather than real crimes e.g. deaths at work becomes an ‘accident’ etc
-People aren’t interested in corporate crime, it won’t sell
Invisibility of corporate crime- lack of political will
-Politicians are more focused on what the people want, which is a reduction in violent crime
-People who donate to the party are sometimes the ones taking part in the corporate crimes
Invisibility of corporate crime- the crimes are often complex
-Law enforcers= understaffed, under-resourced and lack technical expertise to investigate effectively
Invisibility of corporate crime- de-labelling
-Corporate crime is constantly filtered out from the process of criminalisation, consequences are usually fines rather than jail time
Invisibility of corporate crime- under-reporting
-Individuals may be unaware that they have been victimised + when they are aware, they may not regard it as a real crime
-May feel powerless against a big organisation
Partial visibility- Eval of why corporate crime is invisible
-Corporate crime has become more visible e.g. Freedom of Information Act 2000
-Synoptic surveillance- can monitor the activities of the powerful e.g. politicians must state what they spend their money on, and it was found that Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi spent the taxpayers money on supplying electricity for his horses stables
