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