Vol. 4 No. 5 (May, 1994) pp. 71-73
BEYOND THE LAW: CRIME IN COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS, CRIME AND
JUSTICE: VOLUME 18, by Michael Tonry and Albert J. Reiss, Jr.
(Editors). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. 307
pp. Cloth $35.00. Paper: $19.95.
Reviewed by John E. Conklin, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Tufts University
This eighteenth volume in the distinguished Crime and Justice
series is the sixth to be organized around a central theme. Six
informative essays of uniformly high quality on crime in complex
organizations are introduced by a ten-page essay by Albert J.
Reiss, Jr., and Michael Tonry. John Braithwaite draws on his
cross-cultural study of the nursing home industry to look at the
way that state regulation in the United States has produced
ritualistic compliance with the rules but frequent neglect of
residents. Nancy Reichman explores the changes in the world of
finance, especially in the exchange and use of information, that
led to insider trading. Peter Cleary Yeager looks at the
competing values involved in controlling industrial water
pollution, and makes the important point that "regulatory
law and compliance are so systematically intertwined that neither
can be understood without understanding both" (p. 99). Peter
Reuter shows how the reputations of racketeers have limited
competition and driven up costs in the waste disposal industry in
New York and New Jersey, largely through customer allocation
agreements that have been ineffectively controlled by state
regulators. Two papers, one by Henry N. Pontell and Kitty
Calavita and another by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins,
explore the crisis in the savings and loan industry.
What is commonly called "white-collar crime" is in fact
misnamed, because many discussions of such crime include offenses
by individuals who are neither of high social standing nor
respectable, two traits central to Edwin Sutherland's definition
of white-collar crime. His definition also emphasized the
"punishability" of white-collar crime, but many studies
focus on behavior that is not criminally punishable and, in some
cases, is not even the target of regulatory activity. Although
Reiss and Tonry correctly observe that much of the literature on
white- collar crime fails to distinguish violations of the
criminal law from violations of administrative law, the essays in
this volume also tend to blur this distinction, perhaps because
the distinction is blurred in the real world of enforcement and
regulation.
Work on white-collar crime often has an ideological slant, both
in the definition of what constitutes white-collar crime and in
the way that the actions of individuals and organizations are
studied. For example, as Reiss and Tonry point out, there is
little work on the way that organizations are victimized by
white-collar crime, and much work on the way that such
organizations victimize others. Little in this volume corrects
that imbalance; even the essays on the savings and loan scandal
persuade the reader that the real victims of that crisis were
depositors and taxpayers rather than the institutions themselves.
Reiss and Tonry avoid using the term "white-collar
crime," which they call "a plastic phrase that means
many things in many contexts" (p., vii). They favor "an
organizational and social system analysis" of the behavior
of organizations over "the traditional criminological
analysis of white-collar and organized crimes and criminals"
(p. 10). The essays here do not examine the behavior of
individuals but concentrate instead on business corporations and
the markets and regulatory environments in which they operate;
such white-collar crimes as Medicaid fraud by an individual
physician and embezzlement by a solo attorney fall outside the
purview of this volume. These essays pay little attention to the
way that corporations are structured, focusing instead on the way
that networks of corporations or markets are organized. The way
that market structure and the legal and regulatory environment of
a market are organized is then linked to what might be called
organizational misbehavior, some of which is crime and some of
which is not.
The editors' disinclination to use traditional criminological
concepts and theories risks segregating these essays from
mainstream criminology. However, some of the authors do place
their
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findings in the broader context of criminology. Yeager's paper
ends with some insightful comments on the implications of Michael
Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's general theory of crime for
understanding the motivations and opportunities involved in
environmental crime. Zimring and Hawkins' paper on the savings
and loan crisis draws on traditional criminological concerns with
the costs of crime, the role of ideology in interpreting the
meaning of crime, and the way the individual and structural
approaches compete to explain criminal behavior. Pontell and
Calavita's paper on the savings and loan crisis points out that
most of the institutions that failed did so because of criminal
violations. Despite these efforts, most of the essays do not draw
on mainstream criminology, probably because it has been primarily
concerned with individuals rather than organizations and markets.
Ideally, criminology would incorporate the kind of market
analysis common to these essays, and those writing on
organizational crime would link their work to the more general
concerns of criminology.
There is little effort to generalize beyond the individual case
studies presented in this volume. Reiss and Tonry might have
helped us here with a longer introductory essay or a postscript
that offered some ideas about what general market conditions are
conducive to organizational offenses. If there is something
criminogenic shared by the world of finance, the cartage
industry, the nursing home industry, and the savings and loan
industry, it is not directly addressed in this book. A general
analysis of the market conditions conducive to organizational
crime might increase the chance that mainstream criminology would
incorporate work such as that presented here.
A starting point for bringing studies of crime in complex
organizations into mainstream criminology is to focus on actual
crimes by organizations, i.e., to return to Sutherland's emphasis
on the punishability of the behavior under analysis. Some of the
essays here are concerned with admittedly important behavior that
is probably not criminally punishable, such as the unwarranted
physical restraint of residents by nursing home administrators.
The essays here offer something important in examining in detail
the regulatory environments in which the various industries
exist, and in showing how regulation affects the behavior of
organizations and markets. Several essays add a time dimension,
showing how changes in an industry and its regulation gave rise
to criminal behavior; for instance, Pontell and Calavita show how
the collapse of savings and loan institutions was the product of
deregulation and the subsequent transformation of that industry
during the Reagan administration. The explanation of how and why
criminal behavior changes over time is often ignored by
mainstream criminology, and it would gain much from incorporating
the findings presented in these papers. In looking at the way
that organizational misbehavior is redefined and changes over
time, these essays make it clear that what is called crime or a
regulatory violation is socially constructed rather than fixed, a
point especially well made in Yeager's essay.
One problem in defining crime in complex organizations that is
not explicitly dealt with in these essays is the precise meaning
of the term "organization." This volume focuses on
crime and regulatory violations by businesses, formal
organizations that have been deliberately designed to achieve
legal goals, but which sometimes violate laws and regulations.
Research on formal organizations, especially corporations, is
rarely linked to work on criminal organizations in the sense of
syndicated or organized crime, even though the federal RICO law
has been applied to both corporate crime and Mafia-style crime in
recent years. Yet a third meaning of organization is the social
structure that sometimes emerges among offenders engaged in a
criminal enterprise such as bank robbery or drug dealing. This
broader meaning of organization treats some crime as an organized
activity, whether it takes the form of a youth gang that has
moved into the crack trade, the Mafia, or a group of investors
who form a savings and loan institution. This way of conceiving
of organization more broadly has the potential to bring together
analyses of several types of crime that have long been of
interest to criminologists: youth gang behavior, professional
theft, syndicated crime, and crime in complex organizations.
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This valuable collection of essays adopts a narrower focus but
admirably achieves its stated goals of obtaining "a better
understanding of the motives and sanctions, the incentives and
disincentives, and the structural influences that shape
organizational crime," and illuminating "the diverse
effects of self-regulation, industry regulation, administrative
regulation, and criminal law approaches to eliciting compliance
with applicable laws and regulations, discouraging illegality,
and discovering wrongdoing" (p. viii).
Copyright 1994