Corporate crimes seem endemic to modern society. Newspapers are filled on a daily basiswith examples of financial manipulation, accounting fraud, food fraud, cartels, bribery, toxicspills and environmental harms, corporate human rights violations, insider trading, privacyviolations, discrimination, corporate manslaughter or violence, and, recently, software manipulation.Clearly, the problem of corporate crime transcends the micro level of the individual ‘rotten apple’(Ashforth et al. 2008; Monahan and Quinn 2006); although corporate crimes are ultimately committedby individual members of an organization, they have more structural roots, as the enabling andjustifying organizational context in which they take place plays a defining role. Accounts ofcorporate fraud, misrepresentation, or deception that foreground individual offender’s motivations andcharacteristics, often fail to acknowledge that organizational decisions are more than the aggregationof individual choices and actions, and that organizations are more than simply the environment inwhich individual action takes place (Huising and Silbey 2018). “Corporate crime is organizationalcrime, and its explanation calls for an organizational level of analysis” (Kramer 1982, p. 79).
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