Corporate violence, regulatory agencies and the management and deflection of censure

Abstract

This thesis offers a sustained and detailed analysis of the complex of discursive and material practices that generate and support a perception of work-related corporate violence as 'non-crime'. It begins by considering growing pressures for the criminalisation of corporate illegality and violence in the UK, and the state's response to these pressures. This, and further evidence within the literature of a significant public intolerance towards corporate crime and corporate deviance raise two related questions which the thesis seeks to address. First why, given potential public support for the labelling of culpable work-related deaths and injuries as crime, do the majority of these harms continue to escape formal criminalisation; and second, how is this criminalisation avoided? What, in other words, are the specific processes and forms that underlie and preserve the non-labelling of corporate violence as 'crime'. In attempting to answer these questions, the role of regulatory law and enforcement in particular is explored. First, an attempt is made to describe the ways in which a general, and routine minimisation and 'demoralisation' of corporate violence and corporate responsibility is produced through both the form and content of regulatory law, and through the representational practices of regulatory and state bodies. Second, case study data provides an opportunity to explore how attempts by the victims of corporate illegality to mobilise the support of the criminal law against corporate offenders may be thwarted by the combined resistance of business and the regulators. In this way the thesis attempts to understand decriminalisation in both its general and in its specific forms - first, by identifying the forms and justifications that produce an ideology of corporate violence as 'non-crime', and second by documenting and exploring how a specific instance of corporate violence is decriminalised in an enforcement context.

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