The Academic Siberia of Corporate Criminology

excerpted from the book

Corporate Predators

by Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Common Courage Press, 1999

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, or 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 textbook on the subject.

If corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined, 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 academics study corporate crime when government funding sources send signals that such study is unwelcome? And why should Justice Department researchers 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.


Corporate Predators