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).
