Emergent Management Morality: Explaining Corporate Corruption

Abstract

As the twentieth century closed out and a new one dawned, a great wave of corporate scandals swept across the United States. They brought financial ruin and bankruptcy to leading firms, led to widespread employee layoffs, decimated workers’ pensions, wiped out untold millions of dollars of shareholders’ investments, shook investors’ confidence, and greatly elevated public mistrust of business in general. To p -level executives were charged with fraudulent reporting of company revenues and profits; engaging in insider trading; looting company treasuries for personal gain; lying to employees, board members, and regulators about their company’s financial condition; colluding with public auditing firms to inflate revenues and conceal costs; illegally fixing prices by restricting energy supplies; ordering employees to destroy potentially incriminating company documents; establishing internal conflict-ofinterest partnerships; creating offshore operations centers as tax-escape havens; receiving outsized salaries, bonuses, stock awards, and stock options as their company’s financial fortunes degenerated; misusing company airlines for family benefit; borrowing and not repaying company funds to build private mansions; buying art for personal use through company channels to avoid paying taxes; and numerous other illegal and questionable actions. As the scandals spread, various explanations were offered. President George W. Bush favored the bad-apple idea, saying that “the vast majority of businesspeople are living by the rules [but] a few bad actors can tarnish our entire free enterprise system” (Bush, 2002). Others cited

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.