Corporate Deviance in Their Seminal

Corporate Deviance

In their seminal works on corporate deviance, experts like David O. Friedrichs (1996) were critical of the lack of attention given to corporate or white collar crime. This lack of interest was due to the mistaken belief that white collar crimes were less harmful that violent street crimes. However, as cases such as the WorldComm case and the Enron trials have shown, corporate deviance could cause far-reaching harm.

There are a number of sociological theories on deviance that could help to explain Functionalist sociologists believe that the concept of deviance helps a society define the limits of acceptable behavior. In the United States for example, formal and informal methods of social control were in place to guard against such unacceptable deviant behavior as such as robbing a bank.

The business laws of the early 20th century, for example, centered on laws prohibiting theft within businesses, or how to mediate business-related disputes.

Though people generally regard white collar crime as a recent phenomenon, sociologist Edwin Sutherland (1983) defines as crimes that are committed "by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation." Such crimes were thought to include illegal activities like securities fraud and tax fraud. In addition to individuals, Sutherland also stressed that legal entities like corporations could also be guilty of white collar crime.

Because of the limited public knowledge regarding white collar crime, Sutherland believed that the impact of such crimes on society was greatly underestimated.

In the above discussion, functionalist theories of deviance show how laws respond to and reflect social needs. As the business world become more complex and organizations grew in size, new laws are just now being written to address the growing issue of corporate deviance. Other theories, related to the social interactionist perspective, shed further light on how corporate acts get defined as "deviant" in the first place.

Sutherland was quite critical of why some crimes were defined as deviant, while society appears more tolerant of other transgressions. For example, individual theft is seen as causing great harm, while the harm caused by illegal pollution and the dissemination of hazardous waste are hardly recognized. In 2002, for example, the Carnival Company, a Florida-based cruise company which operates 40 ships, was convicted of falsifying its oil record books. The company under-reported the levels of oil in the bilge water it discharged. The higher levels of oil threatened ocean life. To avoid prosecution, Carnival agreed to pay $18 million in fines (Ferro 2003).

Though Carnival was guilty of wrongdoing, few members of the general public at the time would go so far as to define Carnival's actions as criminally deviant.