Steve Tombs

Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful

Even in formally open, liberal, democratic states, a series of barriers exist as obstacles to critical criminologists who wish to conduct research that scrutinises the activities of powerful states and corporations. Much evidence suggests that in the current political climate, the barring of access to sources of data, neo-liberal re-configurations in the funding of research, and the narrowing of publishing and dissemination opportunities to counter-hegemonic voices are severely limiting the ability to conduct critical research. This article reports on recent experiences of researchers concerned with unmasking the crimes of the powerful and argues that, despite the obstacles power sources use to obscure and mystify the illegal and violent practices engaged in by states and corporations, there remains fertile space around research agendas, and in universities, for critical researchers to exploit. To gain insight from the ways in which researchers can, and do, establish alternative agendas, this article seeks to explore some of the principles that might inform and encourage those forms of resistance, and to establish how critical criminologists might continue to subject the powerful to scrutiny.

Social Protection After the Crisis: regulation without enforcement

UK austerity policies include anti-regulatory pressures to ‘free up’ private capital to produce wealth, employment and tax revenues. This topical book considers the economic, political and social consequences of the economic crisis, the nature of social protection and the dynamics of the current crisis of regulation. It is unique in documenting how economic and social welfare are inconsistent with corporate freedom, and in an empirical and theoretical analysis of regulatory reform within the context of wide-scale social change. Based on empirical research and with a focus on environmental, food, and workplace safety, it considers how we reached the current crisis of anti-regulation and how we might overcome it. The book proposes radically rethinking ‘regulation’ to address conceptual, policy and practical issues, making the book essential reading for those interested in this important topic.

The Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime

Among the paucity of British work on corporate and business crimes, one general area of study stands out – work around ‘safety crimes’. In fact, this body of work consists of at least two (related) areas: research on a whole range of offences against employees’ occupational safety and health (OSH), such as failures to provide information and training, illegal workplace exposures, and failures to provide or maintain safe plant and/or equipment; and research around enforcement, particularly on the part of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and its various inspectorates. Thus, within a relatively small circle of British academics writing on corporate crime, a disproportionate number – I would include here David Bergman, Courtney Davis, Frank Pearce, Gary Slapper, Celia Wells and David Whyte, among others – have taken some aspect of OSH as a key, or primary, focus.

Whistleblowing, organisational harm and the self-regulating organisation

This article reviews some of the mainstream policies proposed to tackle the economic crisis of 2008-09 and its aftermath, and goes on to advocate a policy of economic stabilisation grants (ESGs). It argues that ESGs, which would be paid to every citizen at a rate that could be varied according to the severity of the crisis, would be more effective in boosting aggregate demand and more efficient in terms of resource allocation. Unlike the alternatives, ESGs would also address directly two key issues deriving from the process of globalisation, namely the growth of systemic uncertainty and rising inequality.

Book Review: Understanding Regulation?

What is regulation? This disarmingly simple and often used term covers a myriad of actions and processes, overseen by international, national and local states and a vast array of private actors. Indeed, such is its coverage that it is perhaps a less than useful term, a point demonstrated by Clarke, who sets out to ‘provide an introduction to the literature on regulation’, drawing in particular upon ‘empirical studies of sociologists and political scientists’ (Clarke, 2000: vi). Thus, in eight chapters, extending across almost 250 pages, Clarke presents us with a great deal of empirical information and some key analytical insights regarding current features of the phenomena encompassed within the term ‘regulation’.1 The clearest theme of the text is the sheer range of activities, functions and processes that have come to be subsumed by the label ‘regulation’. Indeed, Braithwaite places the task of generating adequate forms of regulation at the centre of his project for a republican criminology. He introduces2 his text by noting the over-arching ‘ambition’ of his work,

Law, Resistance and Reform:'Regulating' Safety Crimes in the Uk:

HILE THE ’law and order problem’ continues largely to be defined in terms of the crimes, processing and treatment of the relatively powerless ’street’ offender, crimes of the powerful that is, variations of corporate crime remain relatively free of critical state and public scrutiny. Yet some varieties of corporate crime have undoubtedly been hoisted on to social, political and legal agendas, notably ’economic’ crimes such as ’insider trading’ or pensions fraud. We should not be surprised that it is these kinds of corporate illegalities that are most likely to be criminalized.

‘How do you get your voice heard when no-one will let you?’ Victimization at work

A longstanding separation between corporate crime and ‘real’ or ‘conventional’ crime is both reflected in and institutionalized through state responses to corporate offending, excluding the victims of corporate crime from consideration or treatment as real victims of real crime. Experiences of this institutionalized disjuncture are treated in this article, through consideration of criminal justice, legal and regulatory responses to six cases of occupational death and those bereaved by it. Drawing upon data gleaned from semi-structured interviews, the article documents further processes of victimization through responses to this specific class of deaths, amounting to a denial of their very status as victims. The evidence presented here coheres with the wider, if hardly voluminous, literature on corporate crime victimization. The article concludes by discussing the wider significance of the struggle for victimhood, not least for criminology itself.

An independent review of British health and safety regulation? From common sense to non-sense

The view that regulatory provisions protecting the employment conditions of workers need to be minimised in order to protect the business needs of employers has been an ongoing theme in British governmental policy discourse over the past three decades. For the present Coalition government, the assumption that current levels of regulation are unduly burdensome on employers and hence harmful to the economy has continued to be enthusiastically voiced, most notably in respect of the regulation of workplace health and safety. Against this backcloth, this paper develops a critical examination of the conclusions of an ‘independent’ review of health and safety regulations commissioned by the present UK Government to shed light on the way in which a deregulatory policy agenda is being furthered. The paper commences by locating the recent review of health and safety regulations, the ‘Löfstedt review’, in the context of other recent government initiatives aimed at alleviating the burden of health and safety regulation from the shoulders of employers. It then moves on to outline the nature of this review and its main conclusions and recommendations, before considering in turn its use of evidence, deployment of the notion of ‘low risk’ and lack of attention to the issue of enforcement. Finally, a concluding section draws together the key points to emerge from the preceding analysis and highlights how the Löfstedt review can be seen to form an integral part of a misleading deregulatory discourse that threatens to engender the wholesale undermining of workplace health and safety protections.

Death and Work in Britain

Official figures indicate that there were 302 fatal occupational injuries in Britain in 1996/97. This paper is a sustained critique of the means by which this ‘headline figure’ is reached. Drawing upon other, more or less recoverable, officially collected data on fatal injuries it demonstrates that there are at least five times more fatal occupational injuries during this time period. It then considers various anomalies and inconsistencies within the legally constituted (and recently revised) categories of data collection, the effect of which is to exclude indeterminate numbers of occupational fatalities, not least to members of the public, to the self-employed, and to other groups of workers. Finally, the paper considers some social processes of under-reporting, whereby occupational fatalities are not recorded in official data. The paper concludes that: fatal injury data is grossly incomplete, and requires work of reconstruction; the actual number of fatalities incurred through work in Britain at the end of the 1990s represents a largely obscured social problem; while there remain questions about both the reliability and validity of official fatality data, it is important that this data is incorporated within sociological analysis, albeit sceptically.

Two steps forward, one step back: towards accountability for workplace deaths?

Abstract This paper examines the origins of the UK government’s proposals for reform of the law of ‘corporate manslaughter’ and evaluates some of the possible outcomes. The paper begins by outlining the principal legal barriers to determining liability for manslaughter where the offender is a corporation, not least the doctrine of identification. It then goes on to discuss key common law developments in involuntary manslaughter cases involving corporations. This is followed by a discussion of the emergence, nature and progress of long-standing proposals for the introduction of new statutory offences regarding corporate killing, and an appraisal of the likely impact of these proposed legal changes. Finally, the paper sets out a series of policy recommendations and insists that the proposals must not be diluted any further by New Labour’s relationship with private business interests.