CRM 1300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Corporatocracy, Profit Motive, Embezzlement
Document Summary
Various forms of white-collar crime and corporate crime are extraordinarily prevalent and post great social, economic, and human costs: far greater than the harms caused by conventional crimes of the relatively powerless. Occupational crime (typically abuse of trust or fraud) Organizational crime/corporate crime: external and internal (unsafe conditions, see bittle) Instrumental marxist: legal difficulties in prosecuting corporations: corporations as juristic persons , corporate structure diffuses responsibility across multiple actors, plausible deniability / executive disengagement. Structural marxist: criminogenic market structure: domination of the market by relatively few major players; volume sales for maximal small-margin profit. Our economy is predicated on the value of growth . The value of a stock is a matter of speculation people are likely to buy into companies on the basis that they appear to be growing. Unscrupulous executives will therefore go to extraordinary lengths to create the illusion of growth: pump-and-dump; exaggerating/falsifying gains and hiding losses in shadow companies.
