The Academic Siberia of Corporate Criminology

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Want to be a corporate criminologist? Prepare for the cold winds of
academic Siberia. 

The American Society of Criminology held its 50th Annual Meeting recently
in Washington, D.C. The program for the meeting lists 503 sessions. Fewer
than ten of those sessions dealt in any way with issues of white-collar
and corporate crime. 

Laureen Snider, a Professor of Sociology at Queen's University in
Kingston, Ontario, Canada, attended the conference. She anticipated the
dearth of papers on corporate crime. The title of her paper: "The
Sociology of Corporate Crime: An Obituary." 

Snider's point: while corporate crime itself might be increasing around
the globe, the study of corporate crime by academics has been declining
rapidly over the years. 

If academics study in the field of white collar crime, they study not the
crimes committed by corporations, but crimes against corporations -- the
traditional white-collar crimes of theft, embezzlement and the like, plus
newly defined white-collar crimes such as "theft of time." 

Instead of focusing on criminal pollution, or the manufacture of hazardous
pharmaceuticals that kill, or illegal union-busting by major corporations,
the few researchers studying white collar crime are looking at how
employees steal from employers. 

"If, for example, you take too long on your coffee break, of if you surf
the net when you 'should' be looking at something that is directly
relevant to the employer's interest, you are guilty of the offense of
theft of time," Snider says. "You are stealing the employer's money by
taking their time." 

This focus fits well with a power structure that rewards ideas supportive
of the corporate domination of society, while punishing those who would
question that domination. 

Snider is one of the world's handful of corporate criminologists --
academics who focus primarily on the study of corporate crime. She is the
author of Bad Business: Corporate Crime in Canada (Nelson, 1993 and is the
editor, along with Frank Pearce, of Corporate Crime: Contemporary Debates
(University of Toronto Press, 1995). 

Corporate criminologists like Snider tend to be found in out of the way
places, like Kingston, Ontario, Canada, or Adelaide, Australia, or
Scranton, Pennsylvania. For some reason, the big city major universities
in the United States find it inconvenient to put up with a corporate
criminologist. 

David Friedrichs is a corporate criminologist who has settled in at the
University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania. 

There, he has written Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime In
Contemporary Society (Wadsworth Publishing, 1996), the most comprehensive
text book on the subject. 

Corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all
street crime combined? So why are Snider and Friedrichs in the tiny
minority of criminologists? 

Friedrichs says the reasons are complex, but one reason is that there is
no broad-based social movement against corporate crime. 

 Criminologist Jack Katz claimed that in the 1970s there was a social
movement against white collar crime, but "that claim was a little
overstated and perhaps premature," Friedrichs says. 

"There was a growth in activity, both in terms of media coverage and
interest in environmental crime and federal prosecution," he told us
recently. "But there was no broad-based popular social movement." 

Another reason is the fact that corporate crime is more complex and in
some ways more difficult to understand than street crime. 

"Corporate crime is not as easily put into sound bites as, say, a brutal
rape and murder," Friedrichs says. 

There are exceptions -- the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example. But it is
much more complex, frustrating and expensive to have reporters investigate
and report on these kinds of activities than on street crime, he points
out. 

"Silence of the Lambs, the movie about a serial killer, was a much more
successful film than Wall Street, one of the few films that looked at
white collar crime," Friedrichs says. "Serial killers cause dreadful harm
to a limited number of people. But they do not represent a major threat to
the society as a whole. They do not cause, over time, the kind of harm
that corporations cause. " 

One major reason why corporate crime gets little attention from reporters,
academics and government officials has little to do with complexity, and
more to do with the simple reality of corporate power. Big corporations
have marinated our formerly independent institutions in corporate cash and
influence. 

Why should reporters tackle tough issues of corporate power and crime when
such a foray might lead to loss of job, income and family support? Why
should an academics study corporate crime when government funding sources
send signals that such study is unwelcome? And why should a Justice
Department researcher propose to keep track of corporate crime statistics,
knowing that business politicians lurk in the hallways, waiting to make
life miserable? 

Snider makes the obvious point that "certain ideas are much more
appealing" to the powerful ruling interests. 

"The idea of corporate crime is one that is simply unappealing to business
elites," she says. "Ever since it was first invented by Edwin Sutherland,
the concept of white collar crime, and specifically corporate crime, has
been actively resisted. Corporations have certainly argued, if they have
had to face up to the idea at all, that corporate executives are not
criminals. We have reserved the concept of 'criminal' for people we think
are different from ourselves." 

The result: our prisons are filled with the poor, the minorities  and the
underrepresented. 

In law, as in modern corporate life, you get what you pay for.  

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor.

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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