Author: Steve Tombs and David Whyte
ISBN No: 978–0–415–55637–8
Review date: 28/04/2024
No of pages: 216
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415556378/
Year of publication: 28/05/2015
Brief:
The corporate criminal: why corporations must be abolished
price
£20.69
The corporate criminal: why corporations must be abolished, by Steve Tombs and David Whyte. Published by Routledge, paperback, 216 pages, ISBN 978–0–415–55637–8, £20.69. Visit www.routledge.com.
Supermarkets, banks, law and accountancy firms; they’re big, they dominate their markets, and they’re damaging to us all. As the book sets out from its provocative title onwards, corporations ought to be abolished. They pollute, they do fraud and rig markets; and the rest of us have to pay for their corporate crime. This might be news to readers who work for corporates. While this is published as a work of criminology, we can ask if the authors aren’t really making a political case instead, against capitalism and the shortcomings of recent regulation. Was – to take one of their examples – the Bhopal accident in India a ‘safety crime’, to use Tombs and Whyte’s term? And, even if the US firms have avoided paying proper compensation to victims, is that a crime either, or – however regrettable or immoral – an all too human or natural effort to wriggle out of paying up? If, as the authors authors remind us early on, were ‘too big to fail’ and needed bailing out, was that against any law?
Recent cases the authors offer are the deaths of hundreds of Bangladeshi textile workers in a collapsed factory; ‘a string of serious frauds in the banking and finance industry’ that according to the authors exposed ‘routine corruption involving household-name UK banks’; and the horse meat scandal in Europe. In fairness, it’s easy for the authors to pile up examples of bad businesses (of all sizes?).
Readers may feel that the authors go much too far in trying to criminalise things; such as food poisoning, (’criminal breaches of food hygiene and food safety legislation’). Did the ice cream or meat seller intend to poison us, if we are later sick?! Or did the faulty lie with our poor food handling? Which brings me to another criticism of Tombs and Whyte’s argument: they seem to assume that the people who make up a corporation – and they range from the ‘one per cent’ at the top to the secretaries and rank and file, very different groups of people in the same company – are the corporation. Surely the mis-selling traders, the short-cutters and the mis-labellers of meat aren’t doing it for the good of the corporation, but to keep themselves in a job and to enrich themselves.
Tombs and Whyte go further, setting out ‘corporate violence on behalf of the state’, skimming over history of big firms backing and bankrolling Hitler and other dictators; and most recently breaching the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Again, there’s always two sides to every story – if the United States was such a cheer-leader for its big businesses, why were the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the first place?
The authors do well to draw our attention to ‘anaesthetising language’ – such as a ‘scandal’ rather than an outright theft. Yet the plain fact is that so few frauds and cases of corporate manslaughter reach the courts – compared with, say, muggings – because corporate crimes (such as phone hacking) are so much more complicated, even if the criminals don’t cover their tracks (and to repeat, they seek to hide their crimes from the rest of the corporation – not everyone who reports for work is a crook, not everyone for instance on a national newspaper was a phone-hacker?!).
Corporations are undoubtedly important, and do much wrong (but then so did nationalised industries, and so may governments, armies, police forces, even universities). Regulators, that to Tombs and Whyte are part of the problem, are grappling with how or whether to punish the individual criminal, besides the corporation he’s an employee of. Because what is the deterrent to a corporation let alone the individual, of a fine, even a large one?
Tombs and Whyte raise an important point, that we should beware of lazy thinking that labels every corporate criminal as a ‘rogue’; and sceptical of corporate social responsibility. But the authors would do better to interview a single corporate worker (let alone a corporate criminal) to ask what it’s really like to be inside a corporation. Instead they tell us that ‘complex hierarchies’ encourage ‘structural irresponsibility’ in a corporation. It’s all the fault of bureaucrats, men in suits, only out to make a profit. But that takes us back to the earlier criticisms – is that in itself a crime? How else are you going to arrange so many people to things as complicated as run factories and supply chains worldwide?
