Introduction

First of all, let us acknowledge the ‘individual–organisation dilemma’: the problem of how to evaluate the activity of organisations given that they are composed of individuals. Can organisations then be regarded as autonomous actors, capable of moral and legal agency? On the other hand, it should also be asked how an organisational context should be taken into account in assessing the conduct of human individuals acting within such a context. In addressing these fundamental questions, the study here adopts a method which combines a development of theory and the testing of argument in three main paradigmatic sites of human and organisational interactivity of contemporary significance. The main theoretical elements comprise organisations as a social phenomenon, the criteria of agency for purposes of assigning a normative (moral and legal) role, the legal routes between the identification of agency and the allocation of responsibility, and responsibility as a device within normative ordering. The choice of the three paradigmatic contexts (the business cartel, the delinquent governmental actor and the criminal organisation) may be explained and illustrated through three narratives of individual and organisational activity, in tales of delinquency perpetrated respectively by a transnational corporation, war criminals and a terrorist arm of government.