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Obscuring Corporate Violence: Corporate Manslaughter in Action
Author(s) -
HÉBERT JASMINE,
BITTLE STEVEN,
TOMBS STEVE
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the howard journal of crime and justice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.462
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 2059-1101
pISSN - 2059-1098
DOI - 10.1111/hojo.12345
Subject(s) - seriousness , homicide , action (physics) , order (exchange) , corporate law , corporate action , criminology , social order , political science , law , law and economics , corporate governance , sociology , business , poison control , economics , suicide prevention , management , medicine , physics , environmental health , finance , quantum mechanics , politics , shareholder
In April 2008, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (CMCHAct) came into force in the UK. Since then, the Act has failed to live up to expectations, resulting in only 26 convictions in the first decade of its existence, despite thousands of work‐related fatalities during this time. This article critically analyses these CMCHAct prosecutions in order to chronicle the problems of the law in action and to demonstrate how the Act serves to downplay the seriousness of corporate killing. In so doing, we approach law as an ‘active discourse’ that is mutually constitutive of the broader social formation, so that it both creates, but is also a product of, the capitalist social order. Thus we explore the extent to which the CMCHAct ultimately privileges dominant beliefs that corporate killing is not ‘true’ crime and that corporate capitalism is an inherent good that must be defended, not disrupted.