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Maurice Punch, Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct: Analysis and Cases, London: Sage, 1996.
Maurice Punch is a well-known writer in the area of organization studies. He has now left Nijenrode, where he was a professor of sociology since 1981, to become an independent scholar. Perhaps his most famous work is a 6-year ethnography of life in a Dutch police force (Punch, 1985). He is familiar with incidents of corruption and misconduct in business and other organizations. He has also written extensively on the politics and ethics of qualitative research methods.
The book is based on Punch's broad research and is very well documented. He offers many stories of European business activity to counter-- balance the overrepresentation of North American material in the literature. There are three sections. The first is an introduction to the ideas and themes that will continue throughout the book, presented as comments on the organizational studies literature. The second is a series of 10 descriptions of exceptional business disasters, along with thoughtful comments on each. The third is a discussion of the inherent contradictions with which businesspeople must contend, leading to Punch's conclusion that "the corporation, and the business environment, are potentially criminogenic" (p. 2).
In the first section, we are reminded that managers are not the rational strategy planners we are led to believe they are. To Punch, spectacular cases of abuse and misconduct are not really exceptions but merely reveal the underlying world of intense political rivalry that sometimes forces managers to become "amoral chameleons, buffeted by moral ambiguity and organizational uncertainty" (p. 5).
He uses the story of Robert Maxwell (flamboyant publisher and con man) to illustrate one of his main points. Not all business deviance results from a misguided attempt to promote the interests of a company. Some managers actually loot their...