Raymond J. Michalowski

The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime:

The important contributions made by Richard Quinney to the study of corporate crime and the sociology of law, crime, and justice have influenced the development of the concept of state-corporate crime. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. The creation of this concept has directed attention to a neglected form of organizational crime and inspired numerous empirical studies and theoretical refinements.

Crime, unemployment, and social structures of accumulation: An inquiry into historical contingency

This article examines whether prior inconsistency in findings about the impact of unemployment on crime is the result of historical contingency caused by changes in the social structures of accumulation (SSAs) associated with the development of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. We explore this question by comparing the relationship between official measures of unemployment and the crimes of burglary, robbery, assault, and homicide during four phases of recent U.S. economic development identified by SSA theorists: economic exploration from 1933 to 1947, economic consolidation from 1948 to 1966, economic decay from 1967 to 1979, and a new period of exploration from 1980 to 1992. We propose that the unemployment-crime (U-C) relationship is shaped not merely by the fact of unemployment, but rather by its social meaning within developmental stages of social structures of accumulation. Time-series analysis of the U-C relationship within each SSA stage from 1933 to 1992 supports our hypothesis that periods of s...

Ethnography and anxiety: Field work and reflexivity in the vortex of U.S.-Cuban relations

This paper explores the ways in which geo-political forces can shape doing, interpreting, and representing ethnographic field work. Using my field work in a law collective in Havana, Cuba between 1989 and 1994 as a starting point, I consider how macro-social relationship—in this case 30 years of political hostility between the U.S. and Cuban governments—can inscribe themselves on the micro-social relations between ethnographers and informants in the field, and ethnographers and their audiences at home. The combination of geo-political tensions and reflexive attempts to discern the impact of these tensions on my field work generated, what I term, disciplinary anxietyand discursive anxiety.I consider how anxieties became part of my reflexive routines in the field, shaped my interactions with Cubans, colored my attempts to interpret those interactions, and affected my framing of those interpretations for audiences at home. I suggest that reflexivity in fieldwork must be sensitive, not only to the standpoints imbedded in the field workers biography, but also to the way in which macro-political processes enter into the biographies of field workers, their informants, and their audiences, and influence the interactions among them.

Is global warming a state-corporate crime?

This chapter argues that global warming can be analyzed as a form of state-corporate crime. It examines how transnational corporations and the nation states of the global North act in concert in ways that cause widespread environmental and social harm. Corporate and state actors in interaction with each other create these harms by (1) denying that global warming is caused by human activity, (2) blocking efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, (3) excluding progressive, ecologically just adaptations to climate change from the political arena, and (4) responding to the social conflicts that arise from climate change by transforming themselves into fortress societies. The chapter concludes by arguing that “green criminologists” need to engage in a “public criminology” that communicates the relationship between state-corporate crimes and environmental degradation to audiences beyond their academic peers.

State-Corporate Crime and Criminological Inquiry

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.

Crime, Punishment, and Social Structures of Accumulation: Toward a New and Much Needed Political-Economy of Justice

The political-economic processes subsumed under the term globalization are remaking nearly every facet of social life, including patterns of crime and justice. Nevertheless, most criminological theory focuses on the etiology of individual crime causation or on failures in local-level institutions, giving little attention to the role of larger-scale sociological forces. The authors propose that there is a need to develop theoretical and methodological strategies that can capture the impact of structural change on patterns of crime and justice. The authors suggest that social structure of accumulation theory offers a useful model for incorporating current macro-social changes into theory and research in criminology. To substantiate this argument, the authors offer a detailed exploration of how changes in labor regimes and related shifts in the balance of placative versus repressive control strategies played key roles in shaping crime problems and patterns of justice in the 20th century.

Ethnic cleansing American style: SB 1070, nativism and the contradictions of neo-liberal globalization

In April 2010, the State of Arizona established the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, commonly known as SB 1070. Characterized at the time as the harshest anti-immigration law in the country, SB 1070 sought to drive illegalized immigrants out of the state by making ordinary life unlivable for them. This article examines four claims regarding the birth, life and possible death of SB 1070. First, the law emerged as a political response to a right-wing populism by promising to preserve White hegemony in Arizona by blunting the growth of the states Latino population. Second, the law facilitated the states interest in legitimacy by promising to restore “the border,’ “citizenship’ and “sovereignty’ as protections against the consequences of globalization. Third, once the Arizona business community, which had been silent about SB1070, realized that the law was threatening economic growth, it mobilized to forestall further anti-immigrant legislation in the state. Fourth, the June 2012 decision by the US Supreme Court in the case of Arizona v United States signals that SB1070 and copycat legislation around the country will loose political traction as the threats they pose to capital accumulation become more widely recognized, and the investor class and their political allies mobilize to stop the passage or weaken the impact of these laws.