case analysis on a corporate crime issue.

Your assessment for this course consists of a case analysis on a corporate crime issue. This could be of an instance of corporate crime or take a broader focus (and remember that we interpret ‘crime’ very broadly here). Beyond this broad remit, the choices about specifics are yours to make. You choose the crime or issue that interests you and you chose the focus of the analysis. Examples of the sort of thing you might want to do are presented below. Your reading list also contains numerous examples of the sort of thing you should be aiming for. These are just that though: examples. Please feel free to aim and construct your investigation how you wish and I’m very happy to discuss your ideas with you in the workshops.

Guidelines:

1. Clearly identify the focus of your investigation.

Are you going to be focusing on a particular instance of corporate crime e.g. Worldcom, Shell’s actions in Niger, Volkswagen’s fixing of car emissions, or what you’ve identified as a wider and more entrenched issue with corporate power and inequality such as the fixing of LIBOR, the (lack of) regulation of the energy industry in a given country, greenwashing campaigns, an analysis of corporate social media output as it relates to a particular crime, a test of state-corporate crime theory or something else! The point is to pick something that has interested you.

2. Identify how you will analyse your topic

This will in part be determined by the topic you’ve picked. But some examples include (these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive):

A case study of a particular incidence of corporate crime:

Essentially, this involves a detailed look at a specific example of corporate crime that points out its unique features. Maurice Punch’s book has lots of these, but many of your readings on corporate crime are essentially case studies.

Examples include: Punch, M., 1996. Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct: Analysis and Cases. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

A discourse analysis of corporate documents as they relate to the crime you’ve identified: ‘Documents’ could be a variety of things. They could include company reports, press releases and other official communiques. They could equally include advertising campaigns and social media releases. For example, you could construct a timeline of a corporate crime and compare it’s various points to what the company said about it Twitter. Equally you might try a comparison of corporate discourses compared to discourses

of those who oppose them.

Examples include: Breeze, R., 2012. Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon. Discourse & Society, 23(1), pp.3-18.

Machin, D. and Mayr, A., 2013. Corporate crime and the discursive deletion of responsibility: A case study of the Paddington rail crash. Crime, media, culture, 9(1), pp.63-82.

McMullan, J.L., 2006. News, truth, and the recognition of corporate crime. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 48(6), pp.905-939.

Williams, J.W., 2008. The lessons of Enron’ Media accounts, corporate crimes, and financial markets. Theoretical Criminology, 12(4), pp.471-499.

Drawing connections between particular practices and corporate crime: You could focus on neoliberalism, deregulation or corporate lobbying for example. You could instead focus on a particular crime and how it was facilitated by government (I.e. an example of state-corporate crime). You might also relate these to a specific instance of corporate crime. If you choose this sort of approach you are going to be looking to draw connections between political processes and harmful corporate activity.

Examples include: Bradshaw, E.A., 2015. “Obviously, we’re all oil industry”: The criminogenic structure of the offshore oil industry. Theoretical Criminology, 19(3), pp.376-395.

Friedrichs, D.O. and Friedrichs, J., 2002. The World Bank and crimes of globalization: A case study. Social Justice, 29(1/2 (87-88), pp.13-36.

Lynch, M.J., Burns, R.G. and Stretesky, P.B., 2010. Global warming and statecorporate crime: The politicalization of global warming under the Bush administration. Crime, Law and Social Change, 54(3-4), pp.213-239.

O’Reilly, C., 2010. The transnational security consultancy industry: A case of statecorporate symbiosis. Theoretical Criminology, 14(2), pp.183-210.

Van den Heuvel, G., 2005. The parliamentary enquiry on fraud in the Dutch construction industry collusion as concept between corruption and state-corporate crime. Crime, law and social change, 44(2), pp.133-151.

Whyte, D., 2003. Lethal regulation: State-corporate crime and the United Kingdom government’s new mercenaries. Journal of Law and Society, 30(4), pp.575-600. Whyte, D., 2014. Regimes of permission and state-corporate crime. State Crime Journal, 3(2), pp.237-246.

Whyte, D., 2006. The crimes of neo-liberal rule in occupied Iraq. British Journal of Criminology, 47(2), pp.177-195.

3. 3. Present your analysis in a logical structured argument with applied theory (cited correctly).

There are no hard and fast guidelines on how to present your case analysis, your analysis is yours and you should take ownership of it, and that includes its presentation. By this point in your academic careers you have read enough to know how to present your work. Your primary considerations should be how well the information is conveyed in such a way as to present your main argument. And make sure you are applying theories from the module to your case analysis to present a new or interesting understanding of the event, corporation or topic.