Book Review: Corporate Crime
| Author | John Braithwaite |
| Published date | 01 September 1980 |
| Date | 01 September 1980 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000486588001300310 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
BOOK
REVIEWS
221
Corporate
Crime,
Rodney
NPurvis,
Butterworths,
Sydney (1979)
pp
806. cloth:
$39.
.50.
This book is
one
which
both
legal practitioners
and
researchers
in
the
area
of corporate
crime
will
want
to have on
their
bookshelf. It is
not
an exciting,
absorbing book,
bursting
with
new
insights,
but
it is an extremely useful work,
one
which
I will find
myself
reaching for on
many
occasions in
the
future.
It
has
something
of
the
quality of a life's work,
being
a full 800 pages. A
compendious
description of legislation
concerning
the
control of
corporate
crime
is
interspersed
with
snippets
of
white
collar
crime
theory. Purvis clearly has a good
grasp of
the
major
theoretical
contributions to
the
field.
The
ideas, however,
are
presented
in
something
of a smorgasbord fashion. Insufficient
attention
has
been
devoted
to
the
ordering
of ideas
and
how a particular hypothesis fits in with
integrating
themes
which
recur
throughout
the
book.
Definitional inconsistencies have in some places
been
blandly ignored. At
one
point
corporate
crime
is
defined
as
"both
criminal activity by or on
behalf
of
corporations
and
crimes
committed
against
them.
It can be applied to
crimes
ranging
from
the
commission
of
environmental
offences,
embezzlement,
to
the
issuing of
false
prospectuses"
(p 31). Yet
elsewhere
we
are
offered amuch
more
restrictive
characterization of
corporate
crime:
"Corporate
crime
consists in
the
main of
breaches
of
statute
law
protecting
the
investor,
the
creditor,
and
corporate
assets"
(p
245).
The
lapses in
attention
to
important
detail can in
part
be excused by
the
breadth
of
Purvis's focus.
Detailed
consideration is given to offences
under
the
Companies
Act,
Crimes
Act,
Trade
Practices Act, Securities
Industries
Act, Income Tax Act, common
law offences,
computer
crime,
investigation, trial
procedure,
and
a
number
of
other
more
abstract topics
such
as
the
knotty
one
of corporate liability.
There
is an
overwhelming
predominance
of attention to
New
South Wales legislation
and
decisions.
Nevertheless,
an
attempt
is
made
from
time
to
time
to
point
out
interstate
differences,
and,
after all, New South Wales has
been
where
most
of
the
action has
been
on
the
corporate
crime
front
during
the
past decade.
It
hardly seems fair to criticize such a
huge
volume
for what it does
not
include.
However,
I feel
impelled
to
direct
the
same criticism at Purvis which Iwould aim at
most
people
who have
had
anything
to say
about
white
collar crime in Australia. Most
of
the
attention
is given to offences
where
the
corporation or its shareholders
are
the
victims of
the
crime
(eg
embezzlement,
insider
trading), little attention
being
given
to offences
where
consumers
or workers
are
victims
and
corporations
the
criminals.
Environmental
offences, industrial
health
and
safety violations,
bribery
of public
servants by corporations,
are
clearly within
the
definition of corporate
crime
but
not
regarded
as deserving of detailed analysis.
Instead
we
must
succumb
to
the
media
preoccupation with
computer
crime
for
example:
the
mystique
of
the
malevolent mathematical ge1lius defrauding alarge
and
powerful organization
through
wizardry at
the
terminal. Might it be
that
such crimes
against corporations by
their
employees should be deserving of less
attention
than
crimes
by corporations against powerless individuals? While
the
former
are
quite
capable
of paying tor
their
own security,
the
latter
are
neither
capable of paying for
protection
nor
capable often of
understanding
the
problem.
The
Purvis book, like
almost
everything
else which has
been
written
on
the
subject in Australia, is a
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