Ethical Theory Of Corporate Crime

Discussion

Organizational crime refers to crime committed on behalf of and for the benefit of a legitimate organization. Corporate (business) crime is a type of organizational crime committed in free enterprise economies and thus involves criminal activity on behalf of and for the benefit of a private business or corporation. Corporate crime takes many forms, including price fixing, kickbacks, commercial bribery, tax violations, fraud against government, and crimes against consumers, to mention a few (Blankenship, 1995). Sutherland’s studies of white collar criminality in the 1940s set a tone and sparked other studies during that initial period. Surprisingly, however, with the exception of a few scholarly works, investigative journalistic pieces,

Business organizations expect their employees to exhibit loyalty to the organization and to advance the organization’s interests in preference to those of competitors or outside groups. The principle of reciprocity requires that, to the extent that employees act in accordance with this duty of loyalty, the organization exhibit a similar loyalty to its employees’ by giving their interests preference over those of outside parties. The presumption of innocence refers to the more general version of the ethical principle that operates within the criminal law. Because of employees’ limited resources and dependence on the employer, and because it is so difficult to prove a negative, justice requires that organizations not assume that their employees have behaved improperly in the absence of adequate evidence (Cliff & Desilets,

Those engaged in such “organizational behaviour” research study how individuals respond to incentives in organizations in an effort to build better interpersonal relationships that allow organizations to achieve their objectives more effectively. This essay highlights that organizations are committed to providing procedural justice to their employees have employees who are more satisfied with their jobs and exhibit higher levels of commitment to the organization’s goals. That is, organizations whose employees view themselves as being treated fairly tend to perform better than those whose employees do not. Thus, regardless of whether one adheres to the stakeholder or social contract theories that posit an independent obligation to employees. Thus, managers are faced with conflicting legal and ethical obligations that require them to make extremely difficult decisions. If the law demands cooperation, does that make it ethical to help the government prosecute those who are or might be innocent or to deny organizational due process to these employees? On the other hand, is it ethical to put the stockholder’s money and the well-being of the organization’s other stakeholders at risk merely to give a fair hearing to those who may well have broken the law and put the organization in jeopardy? Think back to the first of the vignettes with