On the Corporate Corruption of Science as a Profitable Business Strategy: An Institutionalist Approach

Dear Colleagues,

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, a considerable stream of legal actions in different countries has allowed the disclosure of internal documents and memos of allegedly respectable corporations regarding their actual management of polluting or otherwise damaging activities for workers, consumers, or the collectivity at large. As a result, the darker aspects of business behavior are being empirically investigated by a growing number of disciplines and scholars, revealing the existence of a highly sophisticated and widespread pattern of criminal conduct.

During the last few decades, researchers in a wide spectrum of fields have documented the direct and purposeful efforts of corporations to disguise public health concerns and affect government policies, particularly in the tobacco, alcohol, silica, and asbestos industries, and more recently, the pharmaceutical, chemical, and ultra-processed food and drink industries. Corporate-funded “objective science” leading to the corruption of scientific literature remains a major problem. (Egilman et al. 2014, p. 121)

Labeled as “doubt or uncertainty manufacturing”, “strategic misunderstanding”, “corporate capture of science”, “social construction of ignorance”, or “agnotology” in the dedicated literature (Mirowski 2011), this manipulation technique, implemented as a routinized pattern of action in business, can be shortly described as follows: suppose the stream of profits of either a corporation or an entire industrial branch is threatened by the (typically internal business) discovery of the social or ecological noxiousness of its productive procedures and/or commercialized goods. In order to block exposure to liability and to slow down or impede regulatory interventions, the endangered company or industry will ordinarily implement a meticulously designed strategy centered on the suppression of alarming information and the corruption of the relevant scientific evidence through recourse to highly specialized consultancy firms, named “specialty boutiques”, and their “mercenary scientists”, operating in the “product defense industry” (Michaels 2008, 2020).

The highly elaborated cost-shifting pattern of business behavior emerging from documental evidence has potentially disrupting implications for a number of disciplines and research fields, such as corporate social responsibility, jurisprudence, business history, criminology, economics, socioeconomic epidemiology, and sociology. In this regard, a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and unifying theoretical framework is provided by the critical institutionalist approach, whose basic premises have been reinvigorated by the new wave of empirical organizational findings on corporate crime. The institutional research program, based on the theory of social costs elaborated by Veblen and Kapp and extended to include Mirowski’s contribution on market inefficiency, the worldwide extending neoliberal privatization regime, and agnotology, offers a highly elaborated interdisciplinary conceptual basis for the contemporary investigation of corporate misconduct and organized crime (Santos-Arteaga 2019).

We welcome original manuscripts dealing with the wide-ranging interdisciplinary implications of the value-maximizing behavior of corporations based on hiding and manipulating information and discussion of the suggested institutionalist unifying conceptual framework for the study of corporate crime.

References

Egilman, D., Bird, T. and Lee, C. 2014. Dust diseases and the legacy of corporate manipulation of science and law. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 20: 115–125.

Frigato, P. and Santos-Arteaga, F. 2019. The Dark Places of Business Enterprise. Reinstating Social Costs in Institutional Economics. New York: Routledge.

Michaels, D. 2008. Doubt is their Product. How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. New York: Oxford University Press.

Michaels, D. 2020. The Triumph of Doubt. Dark Money and the Science of Deception. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mirowski, P. 2011. Science-Mart. Privatizing American Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dr. Pietro Frigato
Dr. Francisco Javier Santos-Arteaga
Guest Editors

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• institutionalism
• asymmetric information
• corporate corruption of science
• doubt manufacturing
• strategic misunderstanding
• corporate capture of science
• social construction of ignorance
• agnotology
• product defense industry
• corporate crime