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Author: Edited by Kevin Walby and Randy Lippert
ISBN No: 9781137346063
Review date: 25/06/2026
No of pages: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher URL:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/?K=9781137346063
Year of publication: 21/08/2014
Brief:
Corporate Security in the 21st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective. Hardback
price
£65
Here is another fine addition to the ‘Crime Prevention and Security Management’ series of books edited by Prof Martin Gill. As he says in a preface, Corporate Security in the 21st Century covers new territory, because as security work goes coporate security is largely invisible. It’s edited by two Canadian academics and has chapters from across the English-speaking world, including in the UK from Adam White (who reprises his important and ground-breaking work on security regulation since 1945) and Alison Wakefield, who reviews enterprise risk management (ERM), as a way of going about the business of corporate security, and covers such topics as convergence of physical and IT security – another way of dealing with ever more connected risks (a computer virus halts a physical oil refinery, for instance). Readers may well find non-UK chapters of some interest, whether about the militarisation of corporate security in Iraq, Canadian university campus security, and security of the ‘Australian night-time economy’. It’s intriguing that English-speaking countries facing similar crime problems are turning to similar answers; in the United States as in the UK, for instance, shopping areas have ‘business improvement districts’ to tax business owners to pay for security and other improvements.
A most newsworthy chapter given the financial scandals of late – the Madoff investment scheme, the dotcom bubble, the US subprime crisis credit crunch behind the 2009 recession – is by another Canadian, James Williams, on what he calls the ‘forensic accounting and corporate investigation’ (FACI) industry. He charts how that ‘industry’ or profession has grown ‘dramatically’ over the last two decades. The ‘primary driver’ he argues, as with most services, is ‘the maximisation of billable hours’,and making a market for their work, usually looking into employee fraud, as ‘self-appointed guardians of the financial health and well-being of the corporate world’, for corporates to dish out corporate justice. Williams queries how accountable and transparent this ‘industry’ is. As Alison Wakefield shows, there’s also a market in offering risk management services. She shows how companies go about managing risks – and acting on failures and disasters. As she concludes, it’s one thing to have the concept of enterprise risk management and another thing what it means in practice; human can make poor judgements or plain mistakes, despite ERM. That suggests that corporate security might widen, into such fields as corporate social responsibility, and governance.
Though a historical chapter, the American academic Robert Weiss’ article on ‘the 27-year reign of terror and despotism’ that was corporate security at the Ford Motor Company in the US from 1919 to 1946 is fascinating. The security ‘Service’ run by a former US Navy boxing champion is described as ‘the largest private quasi-military organisation in the world by the late 1930s’. That brought power and influence; whereas it’s a well-trodden path from police desks to corporate security offices, in interwar America a police chief in a Ford factory area might be a former Ford security man. Discipline enforced by guards is likened by Weiss to prison.
While like other hardbacks in this series you might quibble at the cover price being steep, a counter-argument is that you get a lot of new thinking and digested research for your money that would cost you more than that even if you could track it down.
