Organization, Management and Crime - Organisation, Management und Kriminalität

This work is dedicated to map the modes of thinking and acting of legal professionals who work in white-collar crime. Lawyers, whose decisions generate economic and political consequences, stand at a strategic location between the state and key segments of society. This monograph’s approach is linked to the foundations of the sociology of knowledge, that culture antecedes and anchors social action. It starts by reconstructing the worldviews that legal professionals hold about corruption and its main participants, and then advances to examine decision-making. The author is introducing an innovative dataset comprised of interviews, court records and biographical data to investigate Brazilian lawyers (1985-2021). The study’s qualitative findings show a professional cognitive pattern that is apolitical and technical, and criticizes unskilled people working in the state administration more than businesspeople. The dominant mindset understands corporate-state relations as a self-feeding system that requires qualification and awareness of international trends to counter crime. The decision-making patterns confirm: (i) that prosecutors and judges prioritize the ends, fighting corruption, and use existing legislation and organizational resources to secure verdicts; (ii) the asymmetries between how bribe-payers and bribe-payees are treated.

Corruption and anti-corruption have long been central public concerns in China, yet the organizational mechanisms through which corruption and anti-corruption operate remain poorly understood. This book takes bribery-offering by unit as its analytical entry point and combines a systematic analysis of 3,886 publicly released court records with in-depth interviews with judges, prosecutors, disciplinary and supervisory officials, and lawyers.

Focusing on visible court records, the book shows how corruption is produced and normalized at the organizational level, moving beyond explanations that reduce bribery to individual moral failure or market exchange. It introduces the perspective of “invisible corruption” to explore why certain bribery practices never enter judicial proceedings. By reconstructing the cognitive frameworks and professional reasoning of legal practitioners, it analyzes how organizational bribery is understood, categorized, and processed in judicial practice, and how legal decision-making is shaped by institutional constraints, political pressures, and organizational contexts. Situated at the intersection of sociology of law, organizational studies, and corruption research, this book offers new empirical and theoretical insights into China’s anti-corruption system.

The literature has highlighted the tensions between democracy and anti-corruption efforts, considering their changing meanings over time. These debates have been traversed by understandings of how to ensure appropriate connections between the public and the private, bearing in mind some of their alternative meanings (e.g., for the public as the state, the commons, manifest or impersonal- reasonable interests). Colombia faced these debates at two critical junctures, which led Congress to pass party and anti-corruption laws in both time periods. To contribute to the understanding of these puzzling tensions, the research aimed to solve the following question: Why did Colombian legislators understand some public-private relations as adequate for Colombian democracy, while others as corrupt in the approval of the 1992-1995 and 2010-2011 party and anti-corruption laws, and why did these understandings change? Solving this question required consulting the literature that has addressed the discussion points on democratization, corruption and the public-private. This, in order to guide the diachronic comparison. The sampling material was composed by the transcription of the debates in Congress that ended in the approval of the mentioned laws, following a qualitative content analysis. It was observed that the congresspeople tended to modify their emphasis of the democratic and non-corrupt: from the protection of the common to the impersonal-reasonable interests.