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Thinking Allowed

The BBC Radio 4 soap, The Archers, which was set up after the second world war to provide public information to provide advice and guidance to rural communities and farmers, has recently featured a big story on fraud. It’s chance, although I wouldn’t bet on it, because, unlike some of the poker playing Archers’ characters who are involved in the current narrative, I’m not a betting person, but the current storyline coincides with Radio 4’s series on 'White-Collar Crime' on Thinking Allowed.

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case. The main protagonist, businessman and wheeler dealer Matt Crawford, has a chequered past and has come up the hard way, unlike his clearly middle-class partner, Lillian, who is not involved in the case, except through her emotional relationship with him. Lillian is a member of the eponymous, largely affluent, Archer family of local farmers, who also mostly occupy the moral high ground, as well as owning much of it: she is also the widow of a wealthy man. Matt has struggled and, whilst on the right side of the law, was tolerated by the local land consortium, Borsetshire Land, but having transgressed, or at least been caught, he is marginalised. In spite of Lillian’s hopes for leniency, he has been sent to prison; ‘Take them down!’ said the judge and listeners were faced with the speed of sentencing and its finality, however well-off the offender.

Matt and his business partner at TWJ bank, Stephen Chalkman (Chalky), receive custodial sentences, and Lillian is left weeping loudly. Matt not only has the reassurance of her fidelity, but also that of earlier storylines, where characters with much more clearly working-class credentials have been reinstated into the community following release from prison. For example, Susan Carter was imprisoned as a result of protecting her brother, the infamous Clive Horrobin, armed robber and hostage-taker, at an armed raid on the Ambridge village shop. Susan currently manages the shop and post office and plays a key role in the community. However, such stories are haunted by class. Matt was never quite accepted; Susan is just the best of a rough family, a fragile step away from social exclusion.

Soaps often engage with social issues, usually with dramatic hyperbole but The Archers offers some more nuanced, complex coverage. The programme, which has a tradition of dealing with big issues: from racism, the rural economy and economic recession to dementia, family breakdown and sibling rivalry, does not limit itself to rural or agricultural matters. It deals with big issues (Woodward, 2009), such as class, family, kinship, place, diversity and inequality, which intersect in different ways, through the lens of personal experience.

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena like white-collar crime in complex ways. As the sociologist C.Wight Mills argued (The Sociological Imagination), this is what sociology does; it demonstrates the powerful interconnections between private troubles and public issues through the sociological imagination. This is an everyday story of the personal and the public and political which has wider resonance and demonstrates, albeit inadvertently, the power of thinking sociologically.

Find out more

• The Big Issues, by Kath Woodward, Routledge, 2009
• The Sociological Imagination, by C Wright Mills, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1970), 1st edition 1959
• Get The Archers podcast
• Serious Fraud Office help The Archers with their inquiries
• Join the discussion on white-collar crime

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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Blogging about

Thinking Allowed

White-collar crime robs, injures, maims, kills, poisons, pollutes, misappropriates and ravages on a scale 100 times greater than ordinary crime. Crime in the suites is much more devastating than crime in the streets. 

The criminal law is preoccupied with individuals who do wrong, and with ideas of personal responsibility. The growth of corporations has been rapid in the last century (there are now over two million companies in England and Wales), but the criminal law has taken a while to catch up and adapt its principles accordingly. Worldwide, of the 100 most wealthy and powerful economic units, 49 are countries but 51 are corporations. 

Although, in the past, companies could do a great deal that hurt people, the law could not do much to affect the companies. For the early part of its history, the company lay outside of the criminal law. "It had no soul to damn, and no body to kick," observed Lord Thurlow, the eighteenth-century Lord Chancellor. The Catholic Church used to excommunicate very early forms of corporate bodies that had done wrong but that practice was declared contrary to Canon law by Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons in 1245.

Hoodies – the least of our worries?
[Image: © 2008 Jupiterimages Corporation]

Public tolerance of corporate crime has sunk notably in recent times. A great deal of evidence now suggests that white-collar crime is phenomenally harmful. Worldwide, more people are killed at work and through industrial practices each year (2 million), than are killed by war. Corporate fraud, commercial pollution of the air and water, crimes relating to food hygiene, trade descriptions, pensions, securities, and health and safety all widely affect the public.

The costs and agonies of corporate crime are huge when compared with those of ordinary crime

The costs and agonies of corporate crime are huge when compared with those of ordinary crime. When a couple of criminally reckless workmen illegally dump asbestos waste, they might seriously endanger several local residents, but when an international company continues to expose thousands of people to the lethal dust over many decades the harm is on a different scale. Graffiti and train seat vandalism are belittled by the scale of toxic material illegally poured into rivers each year. 20,000 people fall victim to criminal assaults resulting in serious wounding but 30,000 are seriously injured at work each year.

Part of the problem has been gaining evidence against companies, not just in respect of particular cases, but also to assist in charting the extent and nature of corporate crime. A Bureau of Corporations was set up by Theodore Roosevelt in America, in 1903, with the purpose of marshalling public opinion against various corporate malpractices. The Bureau was to investigate companies and also to maintain an inquiry on an industry-wide level. The Bureau, though, was disbanded after a very short time because of the need to obtain election funds from some of the largest corporations.

We should be more worried about crooks with clean finger nails, quiet voices and white collars than we should about chavs in hoodies

National research I have conducted over a five-year period, produced evidence that 60 per cent of commercially-related deaths are caused by profit considerations taking priority over safety. It also suggested that prosecutions for corporate manslaughter should be running at the rate of one a week instead of one a year. If we are concerned about crime that hurts and robs ordinary people, we should be more worried about crooks with clean finger nails, quiet voices and white collars than we should about chavs in hoodies.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: The meaning of crime – free learning material from The Open University
• Punishment and corporate crime
• Discuss white-collar crime

About the author

Professor Gary Slapper is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. He is the author of various books on English Law, and corporate crime, and has written about Law for The Times for fifteen years.

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Blogging about

Thinking Allowed

Sport might appear to be all about fair play, but it is also all about winning and losing; and some of the rewards for success are rich indeed. Consequently, there are powerful temptations to bend, or even break, the rules to secure the rich prizes that are available to the winners. To some extent sport makes its own rules, although decision making is increasingly subject to public appraisal and the sponsors of sport and its regulatory bodies must abide by the rules of the wider society. Sport has its own governing bodies that regulate the bodies that take part.

Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable.

Although sport is big business, and constituted by media, sponsorship and commercial networks as well as its practitioners, at all levels, it is also a particular social world, which seems to operate outside the parameters of convention in an uneasy relationship between promoting competition and elite outcomes, at the same time as widening participation and creating greater equality and cohesion. Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable (for some).

Sport is not outside debates about corruption and unfair, even illegal practices, although what is categorised as corruption in sport often centres on revelations of drug abuse and performance enhancement by individual athletes. Doping and match fixing affect the results of sporting events, which undermine the basic principles of sport, and implicate participants, organising bodies and promoters. Ideals of fair play and amateurism underpinned the Olympic movement; the modern Games were based on a movement with stated ideals, some of which seem less relevant today, like the amateur ideal and requirement that athletes be amateurs and not professionals.

Marc Hodler revealled corruption in the International Olympic Committee
[Image from Wikimedia: available under GNU Free Documentation Licence]

The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes

Ideas about democratic participation and fair play remain a powerful part of Olympic rhetoric and governance, although what counts as social exclusion or social inclusion in sport varies according to time and place. These ideals not only seem incompatible with corruption, they also serve to conceal it; rather like white-collar crime. It’s not what convention leads us to expect, whatever the current furore about bankers and politicians, so it passes unnoticed. The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes that precede success in being the host city. As Andrew Jennings has demonstrated, corrupt practices have been rife within the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and came to a head with the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, when Marc Hodler, an IOC member, broke ranks and revealed that agents had been bribed to vote for cities bidding for the right to host the Games. This blew the lid on systematic malpractice within the IOC, and an internal enquiry found clear evidence that up to 20 of the 110 IOC members had been bribed to vote for Salt Lake. It didn’t stop in 2002, though, and there continue to be claims of corruption in the bidding process in the lead-up to 2012. 

The 2012 website may be counting off the days, but news stories also show some of the tensions and difficulties that beset the staging of any such mega sporting event and, indeed, sport in general. Like all sporting activities, the Games involve both winning and losing, success and failure, equalities and inequalities. The Olympic democratic ideals, global reach and wide range of sports and participation mean that the Games lend themselves more powerfully to such a politics of inclusion than most other sports, especially those which are dominated by commercial concerns.

Corruption in the Games, as across sport, can be seen as the outcome of a failure of governance as Sunder Katwala has argued. This failure can be seen in part as dependent upon the inequalities that permeate the organisation of sport, and not the more corporeal inequalities or differences in skill and competence that are displayed on the field. Corruption in sport may be primarily economic and financial but it is also social and cultural and draws on social inequalities that are not entirely dependent on athletic competence.

If some of the lessons learned from critiques of white-collar crime mean drawing attention to the privileges of class, gender and ethnicity that can be obscured by ever growing bureaucratic regulatory bodies, then this concept has some purchase in understanding the slow pace of change in the governance of sport.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: Influences on corporate governance – free learning material from The Open University
• The great Olympic illusion

Further reading

• 'Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating and Regulatory Bodies', by Kath Woodward, Palgrave Macmillan
• 'Dishonored Games: Corruption, Money and Greed at the Olympics', by Viv Simpson and Andrew Jennings, SPI Books (US)

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts