Taming business? Understanding effectiveness in the control of corporate and white-collar crime
Abstract
The harms generated by business activity are undeniable and their persistence, despite eff orts at their control, striking. Criminologists, amongst others, have documented the range of these harms 1 from financial (Snider 2007), to the deaths and injuries of workers (Tombs and Whyte 2007) and of the public (Hutter 2001), devastation of the environment (Beirne and South 2007), the abuse of market system ideals through insider trading (Polk and Weston 1990, cf. Bhidé 2009) and market manipulation (Punch 1996). The focus of this chapter is to analyse critically the possibilities ofcontrol and reduction of these harms by placing them in their economic and political context. It argues that control measures are best understood when framed not only around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which they explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should infl uence business behaviour and the institutional conditions under which business activity occurs.