FIRE DEPARTMENT

Fire Department

Introduction

Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer's concept of state-corporate crime recognizes that socially injurious actions can be facilitated at the intersection of the political and economic orders, regardless of the existence of criminal codes officially recognizing the malevolence of those actions. Grounded in both the critical criminological discourse of the 1970s and the existing literature on organizational deviance, the concept represents an advance over existing explanations that did not account for the interdependent nature of relationships between public and private institutions. The following discussion chronicles some of the theoretical developments that led to the formulation of the concept of state-corporate crime and articulates the explanatory framework of state-corporate crime. An attempt is also made to highlight some of the case studies examined within its context.

The Concept

Michalowski and Kramer (2006) note that the concept of state-corporate crime was formulated amidst the suite of investigations that followed the 1986 explosion of the NASA space shuttle Challenger. However, the episteme of the time did not recognize the functional interdependencies between corporate and government entities, evident in the fact that those two institutions have traditionally been studied separately within the literature on organizational deviance. The concept of state-corporate crime represents an advance over previous studies of corporate or governmental malfeasance in that it recognizes the instrumental role that those relationships play in facilitating socially injurious outcomes (Kramer, 2006).

State-corporate crime involves at least two entities (public and private) and is described by Michalowski and Kramer as “illegal or socially injurious actions that result from a mutually-reinforcing interaction between 1) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of political governance, and 2) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of economic production and distribution” (p. 20). Furthermore, Judy Aulette and Michalowski identify two types of state-corporate crime: state-initiated and state-facilitated. State-initiated corporate crime refers to socially injurious actions that result from corporate entities working at the behest of (or with the tacit approval of) governmental organizations. State-facilitated corporate crime refers to the failure of governmental authorities to create meaningful regulatory or enforcement mechanisms concerning organizational malfeasance. Incorporating insights from a number of differing theoretical perspectives on organizational deviance, the researchers have identified three “catalysts for action” that impact deviant organizational outcomes. These catalysts include the degree of emphasis on goal attainment within organizations, the balance between institutional and noninstitutional means for achieving those goals, and the functional availability of effective sources of social control.

Case Studies

As previously noted, the concept of state-corporate crime was developed subsequent to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Kramer's analysis of that tragedy revealed that it was not simply the result of an accident, as so many at the time had presumed, but instead was the result of faulty decision making on the part of government safety experts at NASA and technical advisors and engineers at Morton Thiokol (MTI), the private company that designed and manufactured the doomed solid rocket boosters. Political and economic pressures resulted in an ethos focused on launching shuttles in a timely ...