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Corporate Crime through Citizens' Eyes: Stratification and Responsibility in the United States, Russia, and Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

V. Lee Hamilton  and
Joseph Sanders
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Abstract

A citizen's judgment of wrongdoing in an organizational setting may depend on characteristics of the citizen, of the accused, or both. In 1993, random sample surveys exploring judgment of corporate wrongdoing were carried out in Washington, DC (N = 602), Tokyo, Japan (N = 600), and Moscow, Russia (N = 597). Respondents heard hypothetical vignettes about wrongdoing in organizations and were asked to judge the actor's responsibility and related issues; they also provided demographic information and recounted their attitudes toward corporations. Education was more powerfully related than social class to responsibility judgments. In the United States, education's effects on responsibility were indirect, operating through attitudes toward obedience and toward corporate accountability. Russian and Japanese results were unmediated by attitudes. It appears that responsibility is primarily a function of sociolegal factors (such as aspects of the case) and secondarily a function of social characteristics and the sense of similarity or difference they engender. The article concludes by discussing general issues in accountability within corporate settings across cultures.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 1996 , pp. 513 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

An earlier version was presented at the Law and Society Association annual meeting, Toronto, 2 June 1995. Research was supported by NSF grants SES-9113967 and SES-9113914 (Law and Social Science Program). We could not have carried out the research without the advice and collaboration of our colleagues in Japan (Naotaka Katoh, Mikio Kawai, Haruo Nishimura, and Kazuhiko Tokoro) and Russia (Gennady Denisovsky, Polina Kozyreva, and Mikhail Matskovsky). We are also grateful to Ralph Kuhn and Toshiyuki Yuasa for assistance with the data management and analysis. Address all communications to V. Lee Hamilton, Sociology Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742–1315.

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