ABSTRACT
A major and necessary mechanism for the development and transformation of capitalist economic and social relations in the US, and also therefore a site of ideological struggle, is its legal system. This chapter deals with corporate crime, as a particular form of organisational crime, rather than ‘white-collar crime’. Successful criminalisation of the illegalities of the powerful would pre-empt them from arguing that their illegalities are merely ‘regulatory offences’, merely mala prohibita. Commercial and professional gentry tried to use the traditional corporate form as a way of both consolidating their hold on social life and of asserting the importance of a conception of property which tied it intimately to public duties and their civil dominion. The danger of a micro-sociology is that, although it sensitises to difference, and its significance, it obscures dominant forms of control within, and indeed the very rationale of, the corporation.
