Harming by Deceit: Epistemic Malevolence and Organizational Wrongdoing (original) (raw)

Information misbehavior: How organizations use information to deceive

JASIST, 2023

Recent examples of organizational wrongdoing such as those that led to the opioid crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown show that organizations can deliberately use information to deceive others, resulting in serious harm. This brief communication explores the role of information in organizational wrongdoing. We analyze a dataset consisting of 80 cases of high-penalty corporate wrongdoing in the United States in the period 2000-2020. Our analysis of documents filed by the US Department of Justice and federal regulatory agencies in those cases found that organizations use two general information strategies to deceive and mislead. First, organizations can "sow doubt" on statements by others that hurt the organization's interests. Second, organizations can "exploit trust" that others have placed in them to provide truthful information. Our analysis suggests that which strategy is adopted depends on the degree that the organization's external information use environment is "contested" or "controlled." Across the cases examined, we observe three types of information behaviors that implement the strategy of sowing doubt and exploiting trust: information obfuscation, information concealment, and information falsification.

The Psychology of Corporate Dishonesty

Despite the large amount of literature that has been written over the last 30 years on the regulation of corporate misconduct, relatively little attention has been addressed to developing a detailed understanding of the human element of corporate dishonesty. Corporations are not by themselves dishonest. Their dishonesty comes from the decisions and actions of individuals within the organization. Yet, important questions on what affects individuals in their decision-making on dishonesty have received limited scholarly attention. This article assists in addressing this gap by developing a psychologically informed perspective on the problem of corporate dishonesty. Drawing on a range of literature from cognitive and organizational psychology, it argues that we need to understand well behaviors that we seek to regulate well. All regulation rests on assumptions and predictions about human behavior. If we do not accurately recognize the factors that affect decision-making on corporate dis...

The Escalation of Deception in Organizations

Journal of Business Ethics, 2007

We develop a process model that explains the escalation of deception in corrupt organizations. If undetected, an initial lie can begin a process whereby the ease, severity and pervasiveness of deception increases overtime so that it eventually becomes an organization level phenomenon. We propose that organizational complexity has an amplifying effect. A feedback loop between organization level deception and each of the escalation stages positively reinforces the process.

Secrecy, silence, and corporate crime reforms

Criminology & Public Policy, 2010

H enk van de Bunt (2010, this issue) explores how both secrecy and silence are artifacts and explanations of some of the most notable corporate fraud in recent years. Two iconic cases are offered that point to a variety of individual-and firm-level factors that contribute to corporate deviance (e.g., employee inaction, deliberate indifference, and an unwillingness to hear or disclosure the truth). The solution to the successful concealment of illegal activities, we are told, is to focus on more than just failed supervision or the need for more and better regulation. 1 Instead, frauds of this kind must be countered by encouraging inquisitiveness and promoting disclosure in ways that defeat the deadening silence and inaction of employees and other insiders. van de Bunt's (2010) argument is undervalued or overlooked too often in extant accounts of large corporate frauds where the default reaction is to suggest new legislation and regulation (see, e.g., Markham, 2006). To van de Bunt's credit, focusing on the harm that comes from secrecy and silence inside and outside the firm encourages something more than the uncritical acceptance that failed supervision, incompetent gate-keeping, and inadequate or poorly enforced regulations combine to explain all corporate deviance (cf. Coffee, 2006). And van de Bunt's argument resonates well with anecdotes of firms that are characteristically opaque and with corporate cultures that inhibit dissent, free communication of allegations of wrongdoing, active whistle-blowing, cooperation with law enforcement, and acknowledgment of wrongdoing (Miceli and Near, 1992). It also connects with accounts of firms that, on the surface, seem compliant but actually are not. Here, the failure may be one of governance, where there is insufficient oversight by the board of directors of the compliance function carried out by senior management (Laufer, 2006).

The epistemic vices of corporations

Synthese, 2023

Vice epistemology studies the qualities of individuals and collectives that undermine the creation, sharing, and storing of knowledge. There is no settled understanding of which epistemic vices exist at the collective level. Yet understanding which collective epistemic vices exist is important, both to facilitate research on the antecedents and effects of collective epistemic vice, and to advance philosophical discussions such as whether some collective epistemic vices are genuinely collective. I propose an empirical approach to identifying epistemic vices in corporations, analyzing a large dataset of online employee reviews. The approach has parallels to the methodology for identifying the big-five personality traits. It surfaces epistemic vices that are attributed to corporations by its own members and reduces the number of vices to the minimum required to describe differences between corporations. This approach yields a new taxonomy of epistemic vices for corporations. While two vices identified have close correlates in the existing literature, four others have not been identified at all or only in aspects. Two of these vices are 'genuinely' collective in the sense that they can only be attributed to collectives.