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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Companies We Keep: From Legitimacy To Reputation In Retail Investment, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
The Companies We Keep: From Legitimacy To Reputation In Retail Investment, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
Few studies have examined public response to unethical or illegal behavior by firms, despite some research on institutional investors, organized protest groups or shareholder activists. Although a robust research literature shows that corporations invest heavily in impression management the relevant audiences for these messages have generally been construed by scholars as other organizations, obscuring the micro-foundations of market activity. This paper will address the knowledge gap by drawing on evidence from a long term field study of retail investors. Based on their responses to firms’ misconduct before and after the corporate fraud scandals of the twentieth century, this paper will …
States And Financial Crises, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
States And Financial Crises, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
Most states act to protect the “safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people” against the depredations of financial crises in some or all of the following ways: regulation; provision of a safety net to protect individuals and key institutions from being irreparably damaged by crises; and, finally, punishment of those responsible in order to prevent crises in future. All three measures are intended to sustain public trust in financial systems. This is essential because, as former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan put it, “Trust is at the root of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange … If …
The Sociology Of Financial Fraud, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
The Sociology Of Financial Fraud, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
If there is an Urtext for the sociology of fraud, it is surely Herman Melville’s 1857 novel "The Confidence Man . This “parable of the market economy” (Mihm 2007:4) follows the title character over the course of a day (April Fool’s Day, of course) as he plies his trade on a steamboat cruising down the Mississippi River—his trade being the extraction of money from his fellow passengers on pretexts ranging from donations to loans. The confidence man succeeds, Melville writes, not just because of his skill, but because the boat (much like the market as conceived in economic theory) is …
Responding To Deception: The Case Of Fraud In Financial Markets, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Responding To Deception: The Case Of Fraud In Financial Markets, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
The economic history of the 21st century reads like a litany of Biblical plagues: instead of locusts,frogs and boils, we have Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, followed by the options-backdating scandal, and now the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. It is perhaps even more disheartening to realize that American investors are still in much the same position as Emerson was over 150 years ago: dismayed to find themselves on the receiving end of deceptive corporate practices. BusinessWeek summed up this crisis in financial markets with the headline: “Can You Trust Anybody Anymore?”
Introduction: Beyond True And False, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Introduction: Beyond True And False, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
It seems fitting to follow Murray Gell-Mann’s Foreword with a story involving two other illustrious physicists. During the 1940s, Leó Szilárd—who discovered the nuclear chain reaction—decided to keep a diary of his work on the Manhattan Project. He told Hans Bethe, one of his colleagues on the project, that he didn’t intend to publish the diary, but only “to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don't you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” Szilárd responded, “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”