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1 – 10 of 362The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top‐ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top‐ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for companies that get a decision by a regulatory agency and which kind of properties there are when the regulatory agency goes to a decision.
Design/methodology/approach
Data on decisions taken against violation (criminal, civil, or administrative) collected from annual reports (1999‐2008) presented on the internet by eight regulatory agencies in Sweden. The corporations collected by the internet site “largest companies” and the Swedish business magazine Affärsvärlden (World of Business). The analysis of data were worked out by cross tab, designed as analysis of covariation between one independent variable to one dependent variable, or two or more independent variables (were one or more of them were held invariant to each other) to one dependent variable.
Findings
Approximately, 60 companies (85.7 per cent) had at least one decision against them during the period 1999‐2008, and 28 companies had more than five decisions (court, administrative law, objection or settlement) against them, which means that 40 per cent of the whole sample performed a carrier criminality. Among the variables, low profitability, interior business, and to some degree, management control tend to covary with some or all kinds of decisions given by the regulatory agencies.
Originality/value
The paper provides the field of white‐collar crime an investigation of corporations as offenders from the Swedish horizon. It provides regulatory agencies with a model of the causality behind the decisions against a corporation.
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John C. Cross and Bruce D. Johnson
Attempts to theorize the relationship between the informal and the illegal sectors of the economy. States that there are significant behavioural similarities. Proposes an emergent…
Abstract
Attempts to theorize the relationship between the informal and the illegal sectors of the economy. States that there are significant behavioural similarities. Proposes an emergent paradigm based on dual labour market theory to explain the similarites and differences in order to guide future research in each area. Applies the theory to the production and marketing of crack cocaine and shows how the model helps us to understand issues of exploitation and risk makagement within the drug market.
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The essay aims to suggest policies that can help strategically deconstruct and dereproduce the establishment of (child) sexual exploitation in Thailand and Cambodia in phases, for…
Abstract
Purpose
The essay aims to suggest policies that can help strategically deconstruct and dereproduce the establishment of (child) sexual exploitation in Thailand and Cambodia in phases, for the purpose of upholding child and human rights and rebranding the global image of these two regional commercial sex hubs in the long term.
Design/methodology/approach
This essay is constructed based on the theoretical framework of the social control and general strain theories. Supported by the theories, the essay examines what are the socioeconomic determinants driving the prevalence of the (child) commercial sex industry in Thailand and Cambodia. Here the essay highlights and summarises how the (child) commercial sex industry has been constructed and reproduced. Next, the essay presents the existing policy gaps in relation to (child) sex tourism and sex exploitation. Last, and more importantly, the essay delivers perspectives on how Thai and Cambodian lawmakers and policymakers should respond to the severe societal problems of (child) sex trafficking and prostitution in relation to the prevailing sex tourism.
Findings
At the national level, Bangkok and Phnom Penh have an urgent need to rebrand their countries, despite partially allowing commercial sex activities. Moreover, to promote gender equality, Bangkok and Phnom Penh should redistribute their education and occupational opportunities, enabling more school-aged girls or work-aged women to obtain a fairer share of life chances for self-empowerment. At the regional level, Bangkok and Phnom Penh have to tighten regulations against (child) sex exploitation. At the community level, the promotion of community policing can be conducive to minimising any prostitution activities. At the family level, more positive socialisation should be exercised. When more children, including girls, are subsidised to enter school, and are positively parented, there are more educational opportunities for school-aged cohorts.
Originality/value
This essay contains scholarly originality and significance in the presentation of the socioeconomic construction of (child) sexual exploitation, and its relationship to sex tourism and (child) prostitution in Thai and Cambodian contexts, grounded in up-to-date, relevant sociological arguments. A major area that identifies the originality of this essay is the examination of existing, relevant policy gaps in a timely fashion, and correspondingly, the suggestion of policy development that helps deconstruct and deproduce (child) sexual exploitation at the national, regional, community and family levels.
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Francis Vinicius Portes Virginio, Brian Garvey and Paul Stewart
The purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two contemporary political economies.
Design/methodology/approach
Research based upon a participatory action research agenda in Mexico and the north of Ireland. Migrant workers and their families where involved in the project and its development. This included participation in the research design, its focus and purpose.
Findings
Migrant workers experiences of labour market subordination are part of wider processes of subordination and exclusion involving both the state, but also wider, often meta- and para-state, agents. In different locations, states and contexts, the precarity experienced by migrant workers and their families highlights the porosity of the formal rational legal state and moreover, in the current economic context, the compatibility of illegality and state sponsored neoliberal economic policies.
Research limitations/implications
It is important to extend this study to other geographic and political economy spaces.
Practical implications
The study challenges the limits of state agency suggesting the need for extra state, i.e. civil society, participation to support and defend migrant workers.
Originality/value
Notwithstanding the two very different socio-economic contexts, the paper reveals that the interaction, dependence and restructuring of migrant labour markets can be understood within the context of meta- and para-state activities that link neoliberal employment insecurities. Migrants’ experiences illustrate the extent to which even formal legal employment relations can also be sustained by para- and meta- (illegal and alegal) actions and institutions.
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Michelle Davey, Gerard McElwee and Robert Smith
Building on previous work from Frith, McElwee, Smith, Somerville and Fairlie this chapter further explores entrepreneurship as practiced by an entrepreneur (who is also a drug…
Abstract
Purpose
Building on previous work from Frith, McElwee, Smith, Somerville and Fairlie this chapter further explores entrepreneurship as practiced by an entrepreneur (who is also a drug dealer) in a rural, UK, northern, small-town context and how he does ‘strategy’.
Methodology/approach
This research was conducted in a broadly grounded approach using a conversational research methodology (Feldman, 1999). A series of conversations were conducted with a career drug dealer, guided by a very basic agenda-setting question of ‘how do you earn money?’ Emergent themes were explored through further conversation before being compared with literature and triangulated with third party conversations.
Research limitations/implications
Implications for research design, ethics and the conduct of such research are identified and discussed. As a research project this work is protean and as a case study the generalisations that can be made from this piece are necessarily limited. Access to and ethical approval for research directly with illegal entrepreneurs is fraught with difficulty in the risk-averse environment of academia. This limits the data available directly from illegal entrepreneurs. The credibility of data collected from third parties is limited by their peripheral interest in and awareness of entrepreneurship discourse, entrepreneurial life themes and the entrepreneurial dimension to crime, as well as by the structural bias implicit in the fact that many of these third parties deal only with what might be termed the unsuccessful entrepreneurs (i.e., those that got caught!) Findings represent a tentative indication of potential themes for further research.
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Throughout history, social philosophers have justified titles of possession by the right of occupation, labour, and social contract, while the economic justification rests on…
Abstract
Throughout history, social philosophers have justified titles of possession by the right of occupation, labour, and social contract, while the economic justification rests on efficiency grounds. Subscribing to the extremely contestable argument that there is a connection between private property rights and the performance and prosperity of capitalism, de‐socialization of ownership was to become the backbone for market oriented reforms in post‐communist society. The absence of clearly defined property rights, their capricious enforcement, widespread cronyism and criminal activity, in combination with a lack of resolution to terminate the quasi‐property rights of the former ruling elite, and imperfect markets have created a situation where, in the final analysis, the original foundation of most rights to property and wealth would hardly survive the test of justice and be validated in any socially responsible society. Moral precepts aside, given these circumstances, it would be hard for an economist to argue that the present process of re‐allocation of rights could be explained on efficiency grounds.
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This paper aims to discuss criminogenic elements and processes inherently presented in business organisations that affect the emergence of crime committed in or by business…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to discuss criminogenic elements and processes inherently presented in business organisations that affect the emergence of crime committed in or by business organisations.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper, based on relevant literature regarding a range of crime-coercive and crime-facilitative elements and forces that promote corporate crime, considers business organisations as a cogent unit of analysis to discuss the causation and origin of corporate crime.
Findings
Business organisations are, per se, criminogenic, i.e. companies are latently prone to committing crime, but are not necessarily criminal. By seeking to achieve commercial goals, companies can unintentionally create an atmosphere that invites crimes and unethical conduct. Organisational criminality is not primarily influenced by deviance in individual behaviour, but is a product of the organisation’s criminogenic settings and environment. Criminal activity arises from contact with criminogenic systems and employees’ adaption to organisational behaviours that do not meet the highest ethical and moral standards.
Research limitations/implications
This is a theoretical analysis, lacking empirical research.
Practical implications
This study can help anti-fraud and compliance practitioners to develop anti-fraud strategies to prevent corporate crime at its source and further discussion on the causes of corporate misconduct and progresses the debate on the sources of illegal and unethical behaviour displayed in, and by, business organisations.
Originality/value
This paper highlights intrinsic features of business organisations that influence companies and employees to engage in illegal activities, malpractice and unethical behaviour and provides a conceptual framework and insights into the realm of inherent criminogenesis within business organisations and how this is shaped by organisations themselves.
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There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal…
Abstract
There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.
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In Chapter 2, the author will develop the theoretical framework of the sociological analysis of youth delinquency in SEA. The author will introduce the control theory (both self…
Abstract
In Chapter 2, the author will develop the theoretical framework of the sociological analysis of youth delinquency in SEA. The author will introduce the control theory (both self-control and social control), in order to understand under what circumstances youths are more and less likely to behave in a deviant manner. The author will, then, mention the general strain theory, to draw the relationships between the encounters of negative life events, the development of strain, and the disposition to perform delinquency. The author will also, address the cultural deviance and social learning theories that help justify the expression of juvenile delinquency from a sociocultural perspective, alongside pathing the way to explaining how social costs of youth delinquency can be raised by policy amendments in order to mitigate adolescents’ exercises of smoking, drinking and sexual misconduct behaviours. In this chapter, the author will highlight how poverty, the availability of delinquent opportunities, peer influence and pressure, a lack of parental and school socialisation, and deviant social and cultural norms are all risk factors for youth delinquency.
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