Description
Globalisation of the economy has given rise to unprecedented corporate power and has created new opportunities for corporate crime, social and environmental harm and global risk. Traditional state institutions, such as public regulatory agencies and national legislation, are increasingly considered insufficiently effective in adressing these transnational risks. This has led to an increase in scholarly attention for private and societal forms of regulation and control by non-state actors. This presentation adresses the potential and role of the media as a ‘regulator’ of corporate harm. I will review two opposing perspectives in the literature regarding media as a ‘cure’ or a ‘cause’ of corporate crime (Rosoff 2007). In regulatory governance literature, business concern for their reputation is considered a powerful regulatory mechanism, and the media performs an important intermediary role by distributing reputational information and naming and shaming businesses. The white collar crime literature however criticizes media for failing to condemn corporate crime and framing it either as individualized or infotainment (Levi 2006), or anti-regulation (Almond 2009). This presentation reviews these perspectives in the light of recent developments related to the globalization of news production. On the one hand, corporations increasingly control reputational information by employing legal instruments such as gag orders, public relations advisors and by controlling news production and negative publicity. On the other hand, globalisation has also generated a more open society, in which the internet creates new opportunities for global social control and transparency. I will argue therefore that neither of the two perspectives adequately represents the role of publicity in the globalized and digitalized society of today and that it is time to innovate the research agenda on the role of the media in relation to corporate crime.| Period | 10 May 2010 |
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| Held at | The London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom |