The Shadow of Effectiveness: An Investigation of Illegal Corporate Activity
This dissertation treats, conceptually and empirically, several forms of corporate illegality and their antecedent conditions. Specifically, the violation types are (a) illegal mergers and acquisitions, (b) anti-competitive trust behavior, (c) misrepresentation, (d) pollution, and (e) illegal domestic and foreign payments (bribery). Included in the aims of this treatise are: (1) Identification of a framework of predictive factors for each type of offense. (Note this is the alternative to the null hypothesis that these offenses are random occurrences.) (2) Determination of differences in antecedent conditions associated with the statutory/regulatory violations. (3) A comprehensive organizational science contribution to the body of literature on businesses running afoul of the law. (4) An integration of theory and empiricism extant in the varied disciplines of organization theory, sociology, criminology, economics, business policy, and law, which have overlapping interests in this area. (5) Addition of a sociological examination of dysfunction heretofore lacking in the organizational literature. (6) Description and implementation of an approach to organizational effectiveness research that closely parallels what Perrow (1977) has labelled "gross malfunctioning analysis." This is not intended to be a substitute for current comprehensive models of effectiveness, but a small-scale (in terms of the scope of the dependent variable) example of future conceptual and methodological possibilities.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign