Abstract
The term state-corporate crime refers to serious social harms that result from the interaction of political and economic organizations. The need for such a concept emerged from our examination of events such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the fire at the Imperial chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina.1 This research made us aware of a class of organizational crimes that were the collective product of the joint actions between a state agency and a business corporation. This suggested that an additional conceptualization of deviant organizational relationships between government agencies and business corporations was needed. Since those original papers on the concept and theory of state-corporate crime, we, and a number of other researchers, have used the concept to analyze a wide variety of organizational harms.2 This chapter will describe the origins and development of the concept of state-corporate crime, review some of the research that has been carried out under this rubric, present the theoretical framework that has been most often utilized, and assess where the study of state-corporate crime might go in the future. Before we will address these issues, however, we will sketch out the historical context for considering the relationship between power and crime and explore the relationship between state-corporate crime and criminological inquiry.
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Michalowski, R.J., Kramer, R.C. (2007). State-Corporate Crime and Criminological Inquiry. In: Pontell, H.N., Geis, G. (eds) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34111-8_10
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