SAGE Journal Articles

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GottScalk, P. (2016). Private policing of financial crime:  Fraud examiners in white collar crime investigations. International Journal of Police Science and Management, 37, 1-14.

Summary: Fraud examiners in white-collar crime investigations represent the private policing of financial crime. Examiners in crime investigations reconstruct the past to create an account of who did what to make it happen or let it happen. This article addresses the following research question: What is the contribution of fraud examiners in private investigative policing of white-collar crime? Contributions are considered to be the benefits resulting from an investigation. To make private policing a profitable investment, benefits should exceed costs. Based on an analysis of five U.S. and eight Norwegian cases, private policing does not seem profitable.

Questions to Consider:

  1. What are the challenges in investigating white collar crime?  How does private policing offer advantages over more traditional policing?
     
  2. What is needed to make private policing profitable?
     
  3. Based on the results of this study is private policing of white collar crime profitable?
     

Rothschild, J. (2008). Freedom of speech denied, dignity assaulted: What the whistleblowers experience in the U.S.. Current Sociology, 56(6), 884-903.

Summary: This article attempts to answer a central puzzle in the field of whistleblower research: why, with the balance of corporate power arrayed against them, with assaults on their dignity, threats to their job security and with legal enforcement that is inadequate to protect the whistleblowers, do we see a growing number of whistleblowers in US society? This article identifies relevant shifts in the US occupational structure and economy, describes societal and organizational dynamics that lure individuals into disclosure of wrongdoing and managers into retaliation, and considers the pervasive effect upon the individual whistleblower of the whole escalating event into which they have been drawn. In order to show the relationship between the abridgement of employees' `right' to dissent and subsequent assaults on workers' dignity, this article summarizes aspects of the research literature to date that indicate the prevalence of management retaliation against whistleblowers, and considers the effect retaliation may have on others who observe similar organizational misconduct but refrain from voicing their concerns. Further, this article presents discouraging new evidence of how whistleblower cases filed so far under the Sarbanes—Oxley Act of 2002 have been adjudicated.

Questions to Consider:

  1. What were the three motivations whistleblowers discussed in interviews with the author?
     
  2. What reasons does the author provide for the increase in whistle blowing?
     
  3. How does the act of whistle blowing extend beyond the single corporation involved in illegal behavior? In other words, what are the greater social implications of whistle blowing?