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Bittle, S. (2015). Beyond Corporate Fundamentalism: A Marxian Class Analysis of Corporate Crime Law Reform. Critical Sociology, 41 (1), 131-151.

Summary: This article uses Marxian class theory to examine the state’s role in disciplining the modern corporation. Over the past decade, the Canadian government has enacted laws extending corporate criminal liability to safety crimes and stock market fraud, and considered, but ultimately decided against, legislation that would have made Canadian mining, oil and gas companies operating in developing countries liable under Canadian law. Using empirical data from Canadian parliamentary hearings, the author argues that efforts to punish corporations through law represent an important struggle over who should have the power to control the conditions for appropriating and distributing surplus value. At the same time, however, these struggles fail to address the fundamental exploitation that Marx identified in his surplus labor theory of class. The author concludes that we need to transcend the state’s law reform efforts to transform the manner in which surplus values are generated, appropriated and distributed.

Questions to Consider:

1. Is Marxist theory applicable to corporate crime? What other theoretical explanations could be explain corporate crime?
    
2. Would a worker controlled democracy work in most corporate environments? What are the pros and cons of adopting a democracy in the workplace?
    
3. What other reform strategies could be adopted to address corporate crime?
    

Williams, J. W. (2008). The lessons of ‘Enron’: Media accounts, corporate crimes, and financial markets. Theoretical Criminology, 12(4), 471-499. 

Summary: While the novelty of Enron and WorldCom as corporate scandals should not be overstated, these events are distinguished by the sheer volume of media coverage that followed in their wake. Drawing from an analysis of over 300 newspaper and magazine articles, this article argues that while this media coverage varies in its diagnosis of the scandals, it is rooted in a common set of taken-for-granted assumptions as to the nature, form, and operation of financial markets. These various points of complementarity suggest that the coverage of the scandals is less significant as an exercise in collective sense-making than as a re-investment in a particular market discourse, a form of financial intelligibility germane to the scandals themselves and instructive vis-à-vis the future study of corporate and white-collar crime.

Questions to Consider:

1. Why is it important to examine the media’s portrayal of corporate crime scandals?
    
2. Two main themes emerged with regard to media coverage of corporate scandals, attributional and recovery discourses.  What characterizes these two distinct themes?
    
3. According to the author, how does the media shape the concept of the American financial market?