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Corporate Homicide: Definitional Processes in the Creation of Deviance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Victoria Lynn Swigert  and
Ronald A. Farrell
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Abstract

A conception of corporate behavior as criminal has entered the scientific and popular vocabulary. This has been accompanied by an expansion of common law to include the activities of corporations. The definitional change is exemplified by the indictment and trial of Ford Motor Company on charges of reckless homicide. The present work focuses on the history of events surrounding this precedent action. Using information from media accounts, it explores the definitional processes by which the world's second largest automobile manufacturer was indicted as criminal. Content analysis of these reports suggests that the expansion of legal parameters to include formerly exempt behavior was preceded by the development of a vocabulary of deviance, personalization of harm, and attributions of nonrepentance to the offender. Public reevaluation of corporate actors and actions in terms of a vocabulary previously reserved for conventional criminality, the transformation of the definition from one of product defect and diffuse consumer cost to one of personal injury, and depiction of the corporation as refusing to recognize the harms associated with its acts, it is argued, opened the way to the application of criminal statutes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , 1981 , pp. 161 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association

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