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37 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (2002)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc37 and id is 1 raw text is: # Crime, Law & Social Change 37: 1-18, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Cultural explanation and organizational crime NEAL SHOVER1 & ANDY HOCHSTETLER2 1Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-0490, U.S.A. 2lowa State University Abstract. Both the number and influence of organizations increased dramatically during the 20th century, which helps explain why the problem of organizational crime has received attention from investigators. Growing interest in organizational and corporate crime has been matched by interest in organizational culture. Variation in organizational culture is employed to explain many aspects of organizational performance, from effectiveness in goal attainment to criminal conduct. There are reasons, however, to be critical of theoretical constructions and empirical investigations of organizational culture. There is both considerable ambiguity about its meaning and an implicit assumption of intra-organizational cultural uniformity. Cultural explanations were developed principally in case studies, empirical analyses are flawed, and supportive post hoc interpretations of interesting or enigmatic findings are commonplace. The influence of hierarchy and agency as constraints on organizational culture has received insufficient attention. We interpret the appeal of organizational culture despite the absence of demonstrated predictive value, and we call for additional research on sources of variation in organizational crime. At the dawn of a new millennium, the number and power of bureaucratic organizations in private and public life continue to increase (Tonry and Reiss, 1993). In the U.S., for example, the number of corporations grew fivefold between 1917 and 1969 (Coleman, 1982), and in the past three decades alone, the total number of business concerns increased from 2.4 million to over 9 million (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1996). Rapid growth of a world economic order has only escalated the significance and potential impact of organizations as they now do business and compete in countries around the globe. The appearance in particular of large corporations, whose wealth and budgets dwarf most nation states and whose operations span multiple coun- tries, raise profound issues of accountability and control. With the number of corporations and other organizations growing daily, the potential for them to harm innocent parties increases as well. When individuals and organizations are harmed by the actions of organizations, frequently it results from criminal behavior. Background and issues As it is used here, crime is behavior that violates criminal statutes, regard- less of whether or not it becomes known or responded to by criminal, by

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