ABSTRACT
This paper reports analysis of ethnographic data collected from individuals who lost funds when a loan company collapsed largely because of criminal conduct by its officers and employees. We describe the range of victims’ experiences and examine whether victimization affected confidence and trust in political and economic leaders and in prevailing political and economic institutions. The findings suggest that 1) the overall impact of victimization on individuals and families ranged from minimal, for a majority of victims, to severe; 2) loss of confidence in economic and political leaders increased, but long-term effects of institutional delegitimation were nonexistent to weak in most cases; and 3) the strongest delegitimation effects were produced by the actions of state officials who devised and implemented a plan to resolve financial problems caused by the company’s collapse. Study design and data limitations mandate that our findings be interpreted very cautiously, but they point to the importance of victims’ perceptions of procedural fairness as a possible determinant of delegitimation. They also suggest that victims’ past experiences and the vocabularies they employ to make sense of institutional failure and personal misfortune may constrain the long-term individual-level delegitimation effects of victimization by white-collar crime.
