The important contributions made by Richard Quinney to the study of corporate crime and the sociology of law, crime, and justice have influenced the development of the concept of state-corporate crime. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. The creation of this concept has directed attention to a neglected form of organizational crime and inspired numerous empirical studies and theoretical refinements.

The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime

In this paper I examine the processes by which agencies of social control become organizationally corrupt, as one instance of the more general social problem of organizations adopting deviant goals. I define organizational corruption, and present three models of how it may develop: (1) the co-optation by social control agencies of the subjects of control; (2) the capture of social control agencies by external exploiters of the “power to regulate” as a marketable commodity; and (3) the domination of the agency by internal exploiters of the marketability of regulatory authority. I explore and illustrate the conditions under which each model is found and suggest some tasks for future theoretical work.

Three models of organizational corruption in agencies of social control

This paper explores issues related to the analysis of a type of criminality frequently ignored in criminological literature: crimes of the state. It explores the potential of critical criminology to deal with state criminality via investigation of such issues as state interventions, overlapping activities of criminal versus non-criminal organizations and the distinction between individual and state actors. The paper specifically examines state criminality via analysis of the activities of the CIA and FBI in the United States. These activities include methods of surveillance, wiretapping, mail tampering, and the use of agents provocateurs. It also examines issues related to relativity in the definition of terrorism and the use of terrorism by the state. It is argued that, unless criminologists begin to address these issues, criminologists may find themselves in the awkward position of aiding the criminalization of non-criminal peoples around the world.

Crime, criminology and human rights: Towards an understanding of state criminality

Les AA. s'interessent a la mise en application de la loi comme reponse a la debacle de l'epargne et du credit et plus largement au renforcement des sanctions concernant les delits effectues par les employes de bureau. La reponse actuelle au mouvement de fraude apparait etre sans precedent en termes a la fois de ressources mises en oeuvre et de poursuites judiciaires de milliers de contrevenants. Soulignant que cette reponse semble dans un premier temps contradictoire par rapport a la relative tolerance du gouvernement envers ce genre de delit tel qu'il en est fait reference dans d'autres etudes, les AA. empruntent des elements de la theorie de l'Etat pour expliciter cette fracture

The state and white-collar crime: Saving the savings and loans

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.

Diane Rothbard Margolis

Papers

Corporate and Governmental Deviance: Problems of Organizational Behavior in Contemporary Society