Distributing Responsibility for Wrongdoing Inside Corporate Hierarchies: Public Judgments in Three...

Distributing Responsibility for Wrongdoing Inside Corporate Hierarchies: Public Judgments in Three Societies

Joseph Sanders and V. Lee Hamilton with Gennady Denisovsky, Naotaka Kato, Mikio Kawai,

Polina Kozyreva, Takashi Kubo, Michael Matskovsky, Ham0 Nishimura, and Kazuhiko Tokoro

The decision rules indieriduals use to judge cvrongdoing committed inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations are not well understood. We explore this issue by asking random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. The vignettes are expperiments that manipulate the actor’s mental s w , the actor’s position in the organization, and whether the actor’s decision was influenced by others in the organi- d o n . We examine ( I ) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross-national differences in attributions. We find that both what the actors did (their deeds) and the position they occupied (their roles) signifkandy influence the responsibility attributed to them. The responsibility attributed to the organizations themselves is a function of the responsibiliey attributed to the actors inside the organization, but not a function of the independent variubles in the expm’- ments. Cross-national differences emerge with respect to the responsibility

Joseph Sanders is A. A. White Professor of Law at the University of Houston. V. Lee Hamilton is chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, International Sociological Association, Tokyo, Japan. The research was supported by National Science Foundation grants SES-9113914 and SES-913967. We wish to thank Ralph Kuhn and Toshiyuki Yuasa for their valuable research assistance.

0 1997 American Bar Foundation. 0897-6546/96/21O4-815$01 .oO 815

816 LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY

assigned both to individuals and to the organizations themselves. We discuss implicarions of these results for past and future work.

The attribution of responsibility for wrongdoing is a judgment task people are asked to perform almost daily. Even when we are judging the acts of isolated individuals, the task is often difficult. The task can become much more complex when we are asked to assess responsibility for wrongdoing that occurs inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations. One central reason for this increased complexity is that responsibility may be distributed to the organization itself and to the natural people who act as the agents of the organization. This article explores how ordinary citizens in three cities make such distributions.

Our discussion is based on data collected from random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., who were asked to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. Based on their responses, we examine three interrelated issues: (1) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross-national differences in responsibility attributions.

A better understanding of how people distribute responsibility for corporate wrongdoing among actors in organizations should prove beneficial to researchers studying white-collar crime.’ They have often noted that the complex hierarchial structure of corporations makes it very difficult to pin responsibility on any single person. This is especially true with respect to criminal sanctions, which usually require a showing of mens rea. Clinard and Yeager note:

A penal sanction is predicated upon the conduct of the accused individual; the mere holding of a position in the corporation, however, is not sufficient to sustain a conviction; the prosecution must show the

1. Edwin Sutherland initially defined “white collar crime” as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” Edwin H. Sutherland, White C o b Crime: The Uncut Venion 9 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983). The United States Department of Justice has offered the following definition: “Those crimes that are committed by non-physical means to avoid payment or loss of money or to obtain business or personal advantage where success depends upon guile or conceal- ment.” Tony G. Poveda, Rethinking White-CoUar Crime 134 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994). For our purposes, the most important subcategories or subtypes of white-collar crime are ( 1 ) crimes against organizations or society that occur because the person’s occupation allowed their commission (e.g., bank embezzlement by tellers) and ( 2 ) crimes against consumers or society that occur because a person did their job within their organization (e.g., “corporate crimes”). Marshall B. Clinard & Richard Quinney, Criminal Behavior Systems: A TyBlOgy (New York: Free Press, 1973); Laura Shill Schrager &James F. Short, Jr., “Toward a Sociology of Organized Crime,” 25 Soc. hob. 407 (1978). In this article we are interested almost exclu- sively in the latter category of white-collar crimes, those committed by organizational actors for the organization.

Distributing Responsibility 81 7

executive’s responsibility as well as his authority to prevent or correct the asserted violation. This issues raises the problem of causality. Sometimes corporate executives argue that they cannot be held crimi- nally accountable for acts they did not authorize and about which they had no specific knowledge. The corporate environment fosters this defense in that lower level personnel often know what the boss wants without asking.2

As this quote indicates, the difficulty in fixing responsibility for corporate wrongdoing arises in part because corporate hierarchies pose a series of principal-agent problems familiar to those who work in the area of attribution theory and agency the0ry.j The corporate environment is a situation where principal control of agent behavior is not perfect, potentially providing the superior with the excuse that an individual down the chain of command has acted contrary to insnuctions. On the other hand, the fact that one is acting as a “mere” agent for another may also be seen as an excuse for wrongdoing. The present research adds to our understanding of how individuals respond to the situational excuses that organizational structures inevitably provide wrongdoers.

The second issue, how individual responsibility is related to the anri- bution of responsibility to the organization itself, is also of central interest to students of corporate crime. The difficulties involved in holding specific individuals responsible for corporate crimes are not resolved by disregarding the responsibility of individuals and holding the organization itself responsible. Corporations cannot be imprisoned, and fines have a number of limitations.+

More fundamentally, those interested in white-collar crime have long debated whether the corporate actor should be thought of as a moral agent

2. Marshall B. Clinard & Peter C. Yeager, Corporate Crime 281 (New York: Free Press, 1980) (“Clinard & Yeager, CoTporate Crime”).

3. Herbert Kelman & V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a social P s y c b f o ~ of Awhoriry and Responsibility (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989) (“Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience”); Barry Mimick, “The Theory of Agency and Organizational Analysis,” in Norman Bowie & Edward Freeman, eb., Ethics and Agency Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); J. Pratt & R. Zeckhauser, eds., F’nhci~ and Agents: The Snucncre of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1985).

4. As Coffee notes, fines large enough to deter may be so large that they put the organization’s viability at risk. John c. Coffee, “No Soul to Damn: No Body to Kick: An Unscandal- ized Inquiry into the Roblem of Corporate Punishment,” 79 Mich. L. Rev. 386, 389 (1981). Even in the case of egregious behavior, it rarely seems to be wise to force the dissolution of the company, with disastrous consequences on employees and others; see Richard B. Sobol, Bend- ing the h: The Story of the Dnlkon Shield BMIeruptcy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Most people argue for a mixed response to corporate crime, holding both the organization and its agents responsible. Coffee, 79 Mich. L. Rev.; Christopher Stone, Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) (“Stone, Where the LMU Ends”); id., “‘The Place of Enterprise Liability in the Control of Corporate Conduct,” 90 Yale LJ. 1 (1980).


and whether it is an appropriate target of sanctions.5 Much of this discussion has O C C U K ~ ~ in an empirical vacuum, relatively uninformed by any sense of how people ordinarily perceive corporations when they judge them. Our data also shed light on this question. Within the American context, these results offer insight into how potential jurors may respond to corporate crime cases when they are asked to assess the responsibility of actors within the organization and the responsibility of the organization itself. Prosecutorial strategies that conform to generally held judgments about the allocation of responsibility within organizations have a greater chance of success. Likewise, organizations defending themselves in civil suits may ben- efit from a better understanding of how people translate individual acts of wrongdoing into organizational responsibility.

Finally, there is the issue of cross-national comparisons. Do people distribute responsibility for corporate wrongdoing differently based on cultural perceptions of how individuals fit within organizations and how organizations themselves fit within the larger society? We chose to replicate this study in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., because these cities represent societies with three different ways of organizing and defining the relationship between individuals and enterprises: socialism (Russia), corporate capitalism ( Japan),6 and market capitalism (United States).’ These organizational forms are part of a larger set of structural and cultural differences among the societies.

Differences between Japan and the United States are the most well defined in the literature. American market capitalism is part of a larger cultural orientation toward individualism in which both human and corporate

5. John C. Coffee, “Corporate Crime and Punishment: A Non-Chicago View of the Economics of Criminal Sanctions,” 17 Am. Crim. L. Reu. 419 (1980); Donald R. Cressey, “The Poverty of Theory in Corporate Crime Research,” in W. S. Laufer & F. Adler, eds., Advances in Criminobgical Theory, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1989); Brent Fisse & John Braithwaite, Corporhns, C.rime and Accountability (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993) (“Fisse & Braithwaite, Cotporations, Crime”); Peter A. French, Collective and Cotporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) (“French, Collectiw/Corporate Responsibility”); Steven Walt & William S. bufer, “Corporate Criminal Liability and the Comparative Mix of Sanctions,” in Kip Schlegel & David Weisburd, eds., White Collar Crime Reconsidered (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

6. Other writers have used different terminology to indicate the nature of Japanese capitalism, such as “welfare corporatism”: Ronald P. Dore, British Faaory-lapanese Factosy: The Origins of National Diwsity in Indusaial ReLUions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) (“Dore, British Factory”); James Lincoln & Arne Kalleberg, C u b e , Control and Com- mitment: A Study of Work Organi~tion and Work Attitudes in the United States and Japan (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Ress, 1990) (“Lincoln & Kalleberg, Culture, Control and Commitment”) and “alliance capitalism” (Michael L. Gerlach, Alliance Capiralism: The Social Organization of Japanese Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) (“Gerlach, AUiance Capitalism”).

7. Ideally, our research would have involved national surveys of these three societies. Cost considerations, however, prohibited this approach.

Distributing Responsibility 819

actors are perceived to be relatively autonomous.* Japanese corporate capitalism, on the other hand, is part of a larger communal orientation in which individuals and organizations are less autonomous and in which individuals are expected to conform to social expectations.9 In addition, relative to the United States, Japan is said to be a hierarchical society in which a person’s status is defined in terms of superior-subordinate relationships.’O Earlier research indicates that these differences affect the way everyday acts of wrongdoing are judged. Japanese respondents are more attentive to situations and roles when attributing responsibility, while American respondents are more attentive to what the actor did.” The present data allow us to replicate and extend this analysis to the judgment of wrongdoing inside organizations.

Russian society presents a more complex picture, especially at the time we were doing our research. Like Japanese corporate capitalism, Russian socialism was part of and embedded in a less individualistic culture than found in the United States.12 Individuals and enterprises enjoyed relatively less autonomy in the socialist system.” On the other hand, as is true with respect to American individualism, socialist ideology defined individuals as equals even in situations where this objectively was not true.14

When we originally began planning this study, the Soviet Union still existed, although winds of change were blowing. By 1993 when we conducted our survey the winds had reached gale force. The Soviet Union had collapsed and privatization had begun. l5 Russian legal culture and perhaps

8. As we use the term in this article, culnrre involves ideas about the nature of persons (and of organizations) and their proper place in the social order. V. Lee Hamilton &Joseph Sanders, Everyday Justice: Responsibility and the lndiuidwl in Japan and the United States 46 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992) (”Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice“); Richard Shweder, Thinking through Culnrres: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

9. Herbert Jacob, Erhard Blankenburg, Herbert Kritzer, Doris Marie Provine, &Joseph Sanders, Courts, Law, and Politics in Compurative Perspective (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1996); Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice; Robert J. Smith, Japanese Society: Tradition, Serf and the Social Ordo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) (“Smith. Japanese Society”); Frank Upham, Law and S o d Change in Postwar Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

10. Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) (‘Nakane, Japanese Society”); John 0. Haley, Authority without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

11. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice 134. 12. Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, & Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory 88 (Boul-

der, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990) (“Thompson et d., Culnrrd Theory”). 13. Inga Markovits, “Pursuing One’s Rights under Socialism,” 38 Stan. L. Rev. 689

(1986); Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Managu in the USSR (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); id., Soviet Indusny fiom Stnlin to Gorbachev: Studies in Management and Technologi- cal Progress (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

14. Christine Sypnowich, The Concept of Socialist Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) (“Sypnowich, Socialist Law”).

15. Michael Burawoy & Kathryn Hendley, “Between Perestroika and Privatization: Di- vided Strategies and Political Crisis in a Soviet Enterprise,” 44 Soviet Stud. 371 (1992); John


the way Russian citizens thought about wrongdoing in corporate settings were also changing.’6 Although the great majority of our employed Russian respondents still worked in state enterprises, we cannot know the extent to which their judgments of wrongdoing in organizations continued to be filtered through the lens of socialist style organizational forms. Hypotheses concerning the effects of Russian socialist culture on attributions of wrongdoing must, perforce, be tentative.

The next section of the article builds on our earlier research in Japan and the United States. It fleshes out the preceding discussion and presents a basic theory of how the existence of a hierarchy affects the attribution of responsibility for wrongdoing in different societies. Section I1 describes the present study. Section 111 sets forth our specific hypotheses and findings. Section IV summarizes the results and briefly discusses their relevance for work in white-collar crime, the attribution of responsibility, and studies of legal culture.

I. RESPONSIBILITY AND HIERARCHY

A. Responsibility Judgments

There ate two fundamental considerations in a responsibility judgment: the actor’s deeds, including the mental state with which they were per- formed, and the actor’s role, including the obligations for which the role occupant would normally be considered accountable.17 Psychologists since Piagetl* have tended to view responsibility as a product of a person’s deeds: in particular, the consequences of an act and a person’s mental state when acting. l9 More serious consequences are sometimes found to lead to greater attributions of responsibility.20 Mental state is even more central to attributions of responsibility. Legal decision rules can be categorized in terms of the

S. Earle, Roman Frydman, & Andnej Rapaczynski, Privatization m the Transition to a Market Economy (New York St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

16. Sara Jankiewicz, “Comment: Glastnost and the Growth of Global Organized Crime,” 18 Houston J. Int’l L. 215 (1995); Stephen Handelman, Comrade CriminaI: Russia’s New Mufiyu (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Kathryn Hendley, “The Spillover Effects of Privatization on Russian Legal Culture,“ 5 Timnat’l L. Ep Contemp. Piob. 39 (1995).

17. Hamilton &a Sanders, Ewryduy justice; Kelly Shaver, The Attribution of Blame: Caw d t y , Respmsibirity and Blameworthiness (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985) (“Shaver, Aan’buc tion of Blame”); Herbert Packer, The h i t s of the Crimmal Sanction (Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1968) (“Packer, Limits”).

18. Jean Piaget, The Moral jdgement of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1965). 19. Shaver, Ataibution of Blame. 20. Elaine Walster, “Assignment of Responsibility for an Accident,“ 3 J. Personality Ep

SOC. Psycbl . 73 (1966).


mental state they require.21 Conviction of a crime routinely requires proof of intentional action, while negligence is sufficient to create liability for civil wrongs, and strict liability exists for certain actions such as engaging in abnormally dangerous activities. In general, people are held most responsible for their intentional acts, somewhat less responsible for their negligent acts, and least responsible for nonintentional, nonnegligent acts that nevertheless lead to untoward outcomes (e.g., unavoidable automobile accidents).

The effect of role obligations on responsibility is equally important. We conceptualize role responsibility along two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. Horizontally, people see others as intimates, acquaintances, or strangers: a solidan’ty dimension. Vertically, they relate to one another as superiors, equals, or subordinates: a ~ ~ ~ T U T C ~ Y dimension.22 The present research focuses most of its attention on the hierarchy dimension.

Superiors have role responsibility for actions of subordinate^.^^ For example, hierarchical role relations tend to be the circumstances in which people are held vicariously responsible for the acts of another simply because of the relationship between the parties. The most important area of vicarious liability in American law is the tort liability of the master (employer) under the doctrine of Tespondeut superior (let the superior answer) for the negligent acts of the servant (employee). In some jurisdictions, parents are responsible for the torts of their children. The common thread across such situations is that the person or entity held accountable has a recog- nized role responsibility to oversee the actions of the person who actually committed the wrongful act. In sum, responsibility rests on a combination of what one does and the duties one has.

B. Responsibility in Hierarchies

A minimal hierarchy exists when one individual has a role-based, nonreciprocal ability to control the acts of another: that is, when two people enter into the relationship of principal and agent.24 Because responsibility is a matter of roles and deeds, hierarchical organizations create a complex balance between responsibility based on role obligations and re-

21. Richard Lempen & Joseph Sanders, An Invitation to Law and Social Science (Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986) (“Lempert & Sanders, Invitation”); V. Lee Ham- ilton, “Who Is Responsible? Toward a Social Psychology of Responsibility Attribution,” 41 Soc. Psychol. 316 (1978); Packer, Limits.

22. V. Lee Hamilton &Joseph Sanders, “Effects of Roles and Deeds on Responsibility Judgments: The Normative Structure of Wrongdoing,” 44 SOC. Psychot. Q. 237 (1981).

23. H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

24. James S. Coleman, The Foundations of Social Themy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) (“Coleman, Foundations”).


sponsibility based on things one has done.25 Responsibility in hierarchies is complex because people cause other people to act. When it comes to wrongdoing within the context of hierarchical organizations, the appropriate unit of analysis is, as Tetlock notes, “the individual in relation to the social and organizational systems to which he or she belongs.”26 Actions are carried out based on orders, instructions, and group decisions. As our earlier work has indicated, when one person or group of persons causes action in another, responsibility tends to be divided between the participants rather than falling entirely on the initial actor in the chain of command.27 Within organizations, responsibility may be shared (however unequally) between an authority and an actor.

Authority often leads to attribution of relatively strict liability for relatively diffuse obligations.28 For example, other things being equal, when superiors and subordinates are perceived to have acted with equal lack of due care, superiors are held more responsible for adverse outcomes.29

Prior research has indicated that the standards to which authorities are held include such diffuse criteria as exercising qualities of good judgment and foresight as well as overseeing the actions of others20 The scope of role- related responsibility increases as one moves up a hierarchy. At the same time, as the earlier quote from Clinard and Yeager (1980) indicates,’)’ deed- related responsibility may decrease as the clarity and relevance of the superior’s behavior decreases. Whatever the absolute amount of blame for a given incident, the trade-off between role-based and deed-based responsibil- ities means that the determinants of responsibility may differ at different positions in a hierar~hy.3~

Attribution of responsibility to people inside an organization need not add up to 100%. Because of its dual bases, responsibility can “multiply.” A subordinate may be fully responsible because of a deed, a superior because of a role, yielding “200%” responsibility. Responsibility can also disappear. The subordinate, who is the proximate cause of what went wrong, may claim to be following orders. The “following orders” excuse may cause responsibility to travel up a chain of command. Eventually it may rest with a

25. V. Lee Hamilton & Joseph Sanders, “Responsibility and Risk in Organizational Crimes of Obedience,” in B. M. Staw & L. L. Cummings, eds., 14 Research in Organizational Behavior 49-90 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992) (“Hamilton & Sanders, ‘Responsibility & Risk).

26. P. E. Tetlock, “Accountability,” in L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw, eds., 7 Research in Organizational Behavior 326 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985).

27. Hamilton & Sanders, E v ~ l u s t i c e (cited in note 8); V. Lee Hamilton, “Chains of Command: Responsibility Attribution in Hierarchies,” 161. Applied SOC. Psychol. 118 (1986).

28. Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (cited in note 3). 29. Hamilton & Sanders, Ewtyday Justice 126-27. 30. Valerie Hans, “Attitudes toward Corporate Responsibility: A Psychological Perspec-

31. Clinard & Yeager, Corporate Crime (cited in note 2). 32. Hamilton & Sanders, “Responsibility & Risk.”

tive,” 69 Neb. L. Rev. 158 (1990).


superior who can claim, perhaps honestly, that what happened was not what was intended or perhaps even that she did not know what happened.33

As this example suggests, if deed based responsibility is greatest at the bottom of a hierarchy, it is also true that subordinates often have available to them a set of role based excuses for their behavior.34 Organizational structures create strong pressures to comply with orders or conform to the expectations of others.35 Conversely, although role based responsibility increases as we move up a hierarchy, it is also true that superiors often have deed based excuses available, insofar as they did not personally act and did not foresee the specific untoward consequences of a general instruction.36 This responsibility duality reflects a larger duality within hierarchical organizations.

Following Coleman, we may imagine the individual as composed of two parts, an object self, which experiences gains and losses, satisfaction and dissatisfaction from outcomes, and an acting self, which serves the object self.37 The distinction is similar to the distinction between the “Me” and the “I” in Mead’s social psychology.38 As Coleman notes, “the agent [the I] does not experience anything, but only acts; it is the self as object of action [the Me], whether one’s own action or that of another, which experience^."^^ Both aspects of the self exist within a natural person who both acts and is the object of actions. When individuals act alone, we can usually disregard

~~~ ~~

33. Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (cited in note 3); Diane Vaughan, Con- trolling Unlaulful Organimiond Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); id., ”The Macro-Micro Connection in White-Collar Crime Theory,” in Kip Schlegel & David Weisburd, eds., White CoUnr Crime Reconsidered (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Valerie Hans & William Lofquist, “Jurors’ Judgments of Business Liability in Tort Cases: Implications for the Litigation Explosion,” 26 Law B Soc’y Rev. 85 (1992).

In such situations the legal system may settle for some middle-level manager who cannot hlly avail himself of the excuse of ignorance or obedience. Sometimes, the logic of responsibility inside organizations produces the proverbial “vice president in charge of going to jail.” Brent Fisse & John Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime and Accountability (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993).

34. V. Lee Hamilton &Joseph Sanders, “Crimes of Obedience and Conformity in the Workplace: Surveys of Americans, Russians and Japanese,” 51 J . SOC. Issues 67 (1995).

Following Lempert & Sanders, Invitation 26 (cited in note 21), we use the word “excuse” as a generic term to describe an “explanation and definition of a situation that absolves or mitigates the offerer’s responsibility for an untoward event.” Such explanations are sometimes called “accounts.” See Marvin Scott & Stanford Lyman, ‘LAccounts,’’ 33 Am. Soc. Rew. 4 6 4 2 (1968); Alan Blum & Peter McHugh, “Social Ascription of Motives,” 36 Am. SOC. Rew. 98 (1971). Excuses differ from justifications, which occur when actors admit their involvement in an event and their responsibility, but deny that they have done anything wrong. “Self- defense” is a justification in this sense. A plea of insanity, on the other hand, is an excuse.

35. James William Coleman, The Criminal Elite: The Sociology of White C o h Crime 217 (New Yo&: St. Martins Press, 1989) (“Coleman, Criminal Elite”).

36. Kip Schlegel, Jwt Deserts fm Cmporate Criminals 79 (Boston: Northeastern Univer- sity Press, 1990) (Schlegel, Jwt Deserts“).

37. Coleman, Foundah’ons (cited in note 24). 38. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

39. Coleman, Fotmdations 507-8. 1934).


these internal complexities. Within hierarchies, however, a split may occur between these two aspects of the self. Hierarchy exists when individuals enter into the relationship of principal and agent. The superordinate gains autonomy because he now experiences gains and losses, and becomes satis- fied or dissatisfied with the acts of another as well as his own acts. The subordinate loses autonomy precisely to the degree he loses that aspect of the self which is the object of action: that is, to the extent he becomes the agent of the superordinate principal.

Bureaucratic rules often reinforce this division. So, too, does the law of agency, which views principals as the actors who experience and thus as the actors responsible for the gains and losses of particular lines of conduct, while it views agents as the tools of the principal, able to bind the principal as long as they are doing the principal’s will. Among natural persons within organizations, the higher one is in a hierarchy the more frequently one comes to act as a principal. The lower one is in the organizational echelon, the closer one comes to serving as a pure agent of authority.

C. Responsibility of Hierarchies

How do people judge the corporate entity itself for the wrongdoing of its agents? More generally, how do they perceive the corporation? As we noted in the introduction, this is a central issue for those interested in the concept of corporate responsibility.40 It is important to distinguish between sanctions imposed on corporations because of a doctrine of vicarious liability and sanctions imposed because of a perception that the corporate actor is in some way morally responsible for an untoward outcome. At one extreme, the legal system could hold the corporate actor vicariously liable for all acts of its agents, whether or not the agent is thought to be responsible and whether or not the agent was acting for the corporation in any sense. This regime is a type of absolute vicarious liability that is unrelated to a judgment that the corporation is morally responsible.

At the other extreme, the law could refuse to hold corporations responsible, preferring to focus on the agents of the organization who are the “real” individuals who have done wr0ng.4~ For example, Japanese law stresses individual responsibility for corporate crime and rarely holds the organization responsible.42 Some have argued for this position because they perceive the corporation to be a “fictitious person” incapable of thinking,

40. French, CoUectiudCOtporate Responsibility (cited in note 5); Schlegel, Just Deserts. 41. Fisse & Braithwaite, Curpmations, Crime 17 (cited in note 5). 42. Id. at 123.


acting, and deciding and, therefore, an inappropriate target for responsibility attributions.43

As Fisse and Braithwaite note, most people take a middle position.# On the one hand, they do not view the corporation as an entity incapable of being responsible. On the other hand, they do not seek absolute vicarious liability. Within this middle range there are a number of possible decision rules individuals could employ. People could, for example, hold the corporation responsible whenever any one of its agents was found to be responsible.45 Alternatively, people might view the corporation as the alter ego of its top managers. Attributions of responsibility to lower-level personnel would not effect attributions to the organization. A third view would adopt a sliding scale of responsibility. The responsibility of low-level personnel would have a small effect on organizational responsibility, the responsibility of mid-level people would have a modest effect on the responsibility attributed to the Organization, and responsibility of the organizational elites would create the greatest attributions of responsibility to the organization itself.

This third perspective is the one we would anticipate because it follows from our distinction between deed and role responsibility as well as Cole- man’s distinction between acting self and object self. From the point of view of the organization standing alone, the corporate actor is a pure form of an object self. Corporations and other nonnatural “persons” cannot act; only their agents, their employees, and their members can act for them. In this sense everyone in an organization is an agent and the organization is only a principal.* We hypothesize, therefore, that organizations will be judged more like superiors than subordinates, accountable for a set of diffuse role obligations including the obligation to supervise, control, and properly direct their agents. From this perspective, the organization is judged most responsible for object self types of misconduct, for the actions of its elites in directing and influencing lower-level agents in acts of wrongdoing.

D. The Societal Dimension

Across societies, corporate organizations share many common structural features that shape the experience of their members. Workers on an automobile production line in Yokohama and Detroit share more with each

43. See Donald R. Cressey, “The Poverty of Theory in Corporate Criminal Research,” 1 Advances m Csim. Theory 31 (1988); Manuel Velasquez, “Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do,” 2 Bus. Gt Professional Ethics J. 1 (1983).

44. FisJe & Braithwaite, Corporationc, Crime. 45. Thii is similar to the rule in the American tort law system, which holds employers

responsible upon proof of negligent behavior of an employee acting within the scope of his or her employment.

46. See Coleman, Foumlations 577.


other than they do with middle-level managers.47 The roles, however, are not identical. Actors are also defined by the typical and stereotypical patterns of relations associated with their position.48 Knowing that an individual is a mid-level white-collar worker in a large enterprise tells one a good deal about the individual’s status, but fails to capture the many perceived role differences between the Japanese salaryman and his American counterpart.

Not only do actors inside organizations have both structural and cultural components, so too do organizations. Toyota, Ford, and the Russian car maker VAZ have a position within the corporate structure of their national economies (and the world economy), and they also have a cultural identity shaped by judgments and attitudes concerning automobile compa- nies and by the larger set of values that define corporations in each society.49 Both structural and cultural components of roles work to define responsibility for untoward acts. Because the literature on Japanese and American differences is much richer, we will first draw distinctions between these two countries and then add some thoughts on Russia. Because of the topic of this article, the discussion focuses on the employment context.

We begin with a caution. The differences described below are only central tendencies. They are not meant to describe an unvarying “national character.”50 There is large variance in each society, and individuals in each country employ both deed and role information in assessing re~ponsibility.~~ In a separate article we discuss the effects of class and education in individual judgments within each society.52 We will present a discussion of age and gender effects in a future book.

Paralleling our earlier discussion of the sohimity and hiermchy dimensions of role responsibility, writers from several social science disciplines have pointed to the importance of societal differences along a horizontal dimension extending from individualism to colle~tivism,~~ and a vertical

47. Robert E. Cole, Japanese Blue Collar: The Changing Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); id., Work, Mobility, and Participation: A Comparative Study ofAmericrm and Japanese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

48. Paul DiMaggio, “Nadel’s Paradox Revisited: Relational and Cultural Aspects of Or- ganizational Structure,” in N. Nohria & R. G. Eccles, eds., Networks and Organizations: S n ~ c - me, Form, and Action 119 (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1992) (”Nohria & Eccles, Networks“).

49. Michael L. Gerlach &James R. Lincoln, “The Organization of Business Networks in the United States and Japan,” in Nohria & Eccles, Networks; Lincoln & Kalleberg, Culture, Control and Commitment (cited in note 6).

50. Ross Mouer & Yoshio Sugimoto, Images ofJapanese Society: A Study of the Structure of Social Reality (London: KPI, 1986).

51. Hamilton & Sanders, Eveyday Justice (cited in note 8). 52. V. Lee Hamilton &Joseph Sanders, “Corporate Crime through Citizens’ Eyes: Strat-

ification and Responsibility in the United States, Russia, and Japan,” 30 Lnw d Soc’y Rev. 513 (1996).

53. C. H. Hui & H. C. Triandis, “Individualism-Collectivism: A Study of Cross-cultural Researchers,” 17 J. Cross-Culnrral Psychol. 225 (1986); J. G. Miller, ”Culture and the DeveL


dimension ranging from egalitarianism to hierarchialism.54 Japan is thought to be both more collectivistic and more hierarchical than the United States.

Japanese employment policies reflect the relatively contextual nature of social relationships. Lifetime employment for permanent employees in larger firms ties workers to employers more closely than in the United States. Practices such as tsukiui, the after-hours socializing among white- collar workers, and workgroup activities such as quality circles produce an employment relationship that is more like family relationships than is typically the case in the United States.55 The results are measurable. In a comparative study of the workplace in Japan and the United States Lincoln and Kalleberg found that Japanese workers apparently have more frequent relations with supervisors, on and off the job: they are also more likely to form close friendships with co-workers and to see them after work.56 For many Japanese workers the firm is not simply their place of employment but a community with which they identify.57

Japanese employment relationships are also more hierarchical. Prior to the 1947 constitution, Japan’s historical family organizational form (the ie) was the fundamental legal and social unit. The ie was a multigenerational structure in which patriarchal authority constituted the basic building block,58 The ie is no longer a legal entity, but the importance of hierarchical structures can still be seen in the practice of basing wages and promotions more on seniority and less on perf0rmance.~9 As Lincoln and McBride note, “A common characterization is that American pursue careers within occu- pations that cut across firms, while the opposite pattern holds in Japan.’16o

opment of Everyday Social Explanation,” 46 J. Personality B Soc. Psychd. 961 (1984); R. Shweder & E. J. Bourne, “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-culturally?” in Anthony J. Marsella & Geoffrey M. White, Culttrral Conceptions of Mental Health and Tharaey (Boston: Reidel, 1982); Harry Triandis, “The Self and Social Behavior in Differing Cultural Contexts,” 98 Psychol. Rev. 506 (1989); id., Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).

54. Louis Dumont, Homo Hiermchim: The Caste System and Its ImQlications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Nakane, Japanese Society (cited in note 10).

55. Smith, Japanese Society 65 (cited in note 9). We should be careful not to overstate the difference. As Atsumi points out, it would be a misconception to think that ts& makes co-workers into close friends; theirs is still an employment relationship. Reiko Atsumi, “Tsukiai-Obligatory Personal Relationships of Japanese White-collar Company Employees,” 38 Hum. Organization 63 (1979). Feeling like family is not necessarily the same thing as being family. The point is that many Japanese employees are embedded in a relationship that is more complex and more enduring than that of their American counterparts.

56. Lincoln & Kalleberg, Culture, Conrrd and Commitment 114. 57. Dore, British Factory (cited in note 6); Taishiro Shirai, “A Theory of Enterprise

Unionism,” in Shirai, ed., Contempurary Industrial Relations in Jupm (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) (“Shirai, ‘Theory”’).

58. Tadashi Fukutake, The Jnprmese Social Structure: Its Evolution in the Modern Century, trans. R. Dore, 25 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1982).

59. Richard Wokutch, Work Protection, Japanese Style 39-40 (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1992).

60. J. R. Lincoln & K. McBride, “Japanese Industrial Organization in Comparative Per- spective,” 13 Ann. Reu. Soc. 289, 297 (1987).


Japanese labor relations also reflect this hierarchical structure. Most labor unions are enterprise unions. That is, they organize workers in a spec cific enterprise without regard to craft.61 Because the top executives of a firm are usually promoted from within, it is often the case that earlier in their careers management directors were officials of the firm’s uniont2 These organizational structures maintain what Nakane calls a vertical society in which individuals are tied together by vertical solidarities (frame) rather than by horizontal bonds (attribute).G3

Culturally, all these structural differences are reflected in a conception of the self that is more contextual than that found in the United States. The Japanese conception of the actor is as a socially interdependent person.@ American conceptions, on the other hand, are more individualistic in the sense that there is a tendency to separate out and distinguish the person from the social context within which the person acts.65 Japanese concep-

61. Kazuo Sugeno, Japanese Labor Law, trans. Leo Kanowitz (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992).

In the United States, on the other hand, most unions are either craft unions (e.g., the carpenters’ union) or industrial unions, unions that organize workers in an entire industry (e.g., the United Mine Workers). Some industrial unions in the United States have branched out to become general unions that organize workers without regard to their occupation, industry, or enterprise (e.g., the Teamsters).

62. Shirai, “Theory” at 139. 63. Nakane, Japrmese Society (cited in note 10). 64. Emiko Ohnuki-Tiemey, Rice as Self: Japanese identities through lime 100 (Priceton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 65. Hamilton &Sanders, Eueryday Justice 52 (cited in note 8). Individualism is a compli-

cated idea. Luke describes four dimensions of individualism: (1) accepting the intrinsic moral worth of individuals, (2) advocating the awon~my of individual thought and action, (3) ac- knowledging the importance of individual priuacy, and (4) supporting self-development as a desirable goal. Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973). Japanese concep. tions of the social actor in fact are quite individualistic on some of these dimensions, e s p cially mmd Mwth and sel,f&uelopment. Japanese attention to selfdevelopment and belief in meritocracy predates Western influence. Ronald P. Dore, “Mobility, Equality, and Individual- ism in Modem Japan, in R. P. Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Chunge In Modem Jopan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1%7). Ikegami has recently coined the phrase “honorific individualism” in his book tracing the historical development of these aspects of individualism in Japan. He and others note that absent these components of individualism it would be difficult to explain Japan’s rapid change from a feudal to an advanced capitalist society. Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific I n d i d d m and the Making of Modern l a p a 350 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

For discussions of the ”individual actor“ orientation in the United States, see Frank Johnson, “The Western Concept of Self,“ in A. J. Marsella, G. DeVw & F. L. K. Hsu, eds., Cultrrre and Self: Asian rmd Western Perspectives (New York: Tavistock, 1985) (“Marsella et d., Culnrre and Self’); Ian Macneil, “Bureaucracy, Liberalism, and Community-American Style,” 79 Nw. U.L. Rev. 900 (1985); Michael Sandel, Liberalism und the Limits ofrustice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For discussions of the “contextual actor” orientation in Japan see Hiroshi Azuma, “Secondary Control as a Heterogeneous Category,” 39 Am. Psychol. 97 (1984); George DeVos, “Dimensions of the Self in Japanese Culture,” in A. J. Marsella et d., C u b e and Self; Esyun Hamaguchi, “A Contextual Model of the Japanese: Toward a Methodological Innovation in Japanese Studies,” 11 J. Japanese Stud. 289 (1985); Smith, japrmese Society (cited in note 9); John R. Weisz, Fred M. Rothbaum, & Thomas C. Blackbum, “Standing Out and Standmg In: The Psychology of Control in America and Ja- pan,” 39 Am. Psychd. 955 (1984).


tions of self are also more hierarchical, as reflected in word usages. Suzuki notes, "In Japanese all terms for self-reference and for address are connected with the confirmation of concrete roles based on a superior-inferior dichotomy in human relationships."66

In sum, along the solidarity dimension actors are perceived to be more individual or more contextual: that is, more embedded in a group. Along the hierarchy dimension, actors are perceived to be equal or unequal along various dirnensi~ns.~~ Together, the hierarchy and solidarity dimensions define four different conceptions of the self presented in Figure 1.

Hierarchy: Unequal

Stratified Individual

I

Stratified Contextual

solidarity: Low

Equal Individual

Equal Contextual

FIGURE 1 Four conceptions of the self

The dominant conception of the self in the United States is an Equal Individual, judged more on the basis of individual attributes than social frame.@ The dominant Japanese conception is of a stratified contextual self that suppresses ideas of individual autonomy separate from social relationships but encourages self development and mobility within the bonds of hierarchical relationships.@ We expect that because Japanese are more

66. Takao Suzuki, Japanese and the Japanese: Wurh in C h e 135 (Tokyo: Kodansha,

67. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice 59. There is an asymmetry between relationships of low and high solidarity in terms of their

likelihood of involving inequality. In societies where relationships are characteristically low in solidarity, the actor is typically thought of and referred to as an equal individual (Hamilton &a Sanders, Everyday Justice 58).

68. Michael Morris & Kaiping Peng, "Culture and Causation: American and Chinese Attributions for Social and Physical Events," 67 J. P e r s o d i c y ff Soc. Psychol. 949 (1994).

69. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice 60. These conceptions of the self parallel the cultural framework developed by Mary Douglas

and Aaron Wildavsky (Mary Douglas, Risk And B h e : Essays m Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992); id., "The Person in an Enterprise Culture," in S. Heap & A. Ross, eds., Understanding the Enterprise Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) ("Heap & Ross, Enterprice Culture"); Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Enuironmtal Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Thompson et al., Cultural Theory (cited in note 12). Thii work describes four ideal- typical political cultures: fatalism, individualism, hierarchical collectivism, and egalitarianism

1978).


likely to see the individual as constrained by his or her contextual situation they will assign individuals in our vignettes less responsibility than will Ameri~ans.7~

We did not have strong expectations about differences in the attribution of responsibility to corporate actors. Although Americans are less likely to honor “role excuses” when judging individuals embedded in hierarchical organizations, this does not necessarily mean they will hold organizations less responsible. In both societies, corporate actors are powerful superordinate entities that may be held responsible for acts of obvious wr0ngdoing.7~

At a national level, Japanese corporations are somewhat less autonomous than their counterparts in the United States. They are enmeshed in a web of relationships both with government ministries such as the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Finance and with each other in conglomerates called keiretsu.72 They might be perceived, therefore, as less independent than corporations in the United States. If so, we may expect that they would be perceived to be less in control of others (less like human superiors) and, therefore, they would be as-

(Daniel Polisar & Aaron Wildavsky, “From Individual to System Blame: A Cultural Analysis of Historical Change in the Law of Torts,” 1 J. Pol’y Hist. 129 (1989); Michael Thompson, “The Dynamics of Cultural Theory and Their Implications for the Enterprise Culture,” in Heap & Ross, Enterprise culture). As Kagan notes, each cultural perspective may employ differing attributions of responsibility for harm. Robert Kagan, “Responsibility, Accountabil- ity, and Adversarial Legalism” at 12 (presented at Law & Society Association annual meeting, Toronto, 1995).

Fatalism and individualism define a cultural dichotomy concerning individual actors. Together, they describe an “individualistic” dimension. Fatalism tends to blame no one for misfortune, sometimes because of a belief that individuals lack the ability to control events. Individualism holds individuals responsible for their acts of intentional wrongdoing and lack of due care. The egalitarian-hierarchical dimension defines opposite orientations to communal/collectivist forces. A hierarchical culture respects and gives deference to expertise and authority. “[Pleople in authority are presumed to know what they are doing and to have acted reasonably unless proven otherwise” (Polisar & Wildavsky, 1 J . Pol’y Hist. at 149). Egalitarian cultures are more distrustful of hierarchies and the power structures they generate. Hierarchi- cal cultures are more deferential to excuses based on following the directive of a superior.

70. We must emphasize that this discussion concerns general cultural values, and not an assessment of the existing social structure or the actual pressures to conform experienced by individuals in organizations. An individualistic perspective on the self in the United States does not mean individuals are unconstrained in their actions, only that they will tend to be judged as if they were.

71. This is a different issue than whether the Japanese are less likely to suspect corporate malfeasance when untoward events occur. By most accounts, hierarchical political cultures create a presumption of correct behavior, whereas egalitarian cultures are quicker to assume untoward outcomes are the result of wrongful behavior. Polisar & Wildavsky, 1 J. Pol‘y Hist. at 148, Sheila Jasanoff, “Acceptable Evidence in a Pluralistic Society,” in Deborah Mayo & Rachelle Hollander, eds., Accep& Euidence: Science and Values in Risk Management (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

72. Daniel Okimoto, Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Indwcrinl Policy for High Technology (Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1989); Kenichi Miyashita & David W. Russell, “Keireuu”: Inside the Hidden Japanese Conglomerates (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); Ronald J. Gilson & Mark J. Roe, “Understanding the Japanese Keiretsu: Overlaps between Corporate Governance and Industrial Organization,” 102 Yale L.J. 871 (1993).

Distributing Responsibility 83 1

signed less responsibility for similar acts of wrongdoing than American corporations.

What of Russia? Like Japanese corporate capitalism, Russian socialism was part of and embedded in a less individualistic culture than found in the United States. Individuals and enterprises enjoyed relatively less autonomy in the socialist system.73 Structurally, workers were relatively constrained in their ability to resist orders from superiors.74 On the other hand, as is true with respect to American individualism, socialist ideology defined individuals as equals even in situations where this objectively was not true.75 Plausi- bly, these factors produce an equal contextual conception of the self, more communal than an individualistic culture such as the United States, but more equal than the smutified contextwrl orientation of Japan. Were this the case, we should expect that people would be less willing to honor role based excuses based on hierarchical position and, therefore, more likely to hold individuals responsible for acts of wrongdoing than Japanese. Some who have studied the Soviet system have concluded, however, that egalitarian values, like individualism, were suppressed in Russia under the commu- nists.76 Unfortunately, we are unaware of any literature on conceptualiza- tions of the self in Russia such as exists in the United States and Japan.

By 1993, of course, Russia was not a traditional, stable socialist society. It was a society in transition, with many individualizing impulses.77 We were not certain how these contradictory factors might affect attributions of responsibility to individuals.

As to corporate actor responsibility, the issue may be slightly clearer. Under the socialist system the enterprise was a relatively weak entity vis-3- vis the party and the industrial ministries on the one hand and vis-his employees on the other.78 Enterprise weakness vis-his the ministries was reflected in the lack of property rights. In liberal-capitalist states, rights of property are defined by courtdenforceable contracts between parties, including contracts between the state and organizations. In the Soviet Union even entities such as individual enterprises that did have some rights with

73. See sources cited in note 13. 74. Riley M. Sindler, "Protections for Mobilizing Improvements in the Workplace:

United States and Russia," 9 Am. U.J. Int'l L. G9 Pol'y 309 (1993); William Moskoff, Hard limes: Impoverishment and Protest in the Perestroika Years 184 (Annonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993) ("Moskoff, Hard limes").

75. Sypnowich, Socialist Law (cited in note 14). 76. Aaron Wildavsky, "The Soviet System," in A. Wildavsky, ed., Beyond Containment:

Alwmatiue American Policies w a r d the Soviet Union (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1983). (Wildavsky, 1983; Thompson et al., C u h a l Themy 263 (cited in note 12).

77. Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An lnterpetntion of Political Cd- w e (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

78. Some recent scholarship has argued that the industrial ministries were dominant political players in Soviet politics and conAicts between the ministries and national politi- cians were an important source of the political and economic crises leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stephen Whitefield, Industrid Power and the Soviet State (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1993).


respect to the means of production did not enjoy property rights in this ~ense.7~

The remedies that did exist, such as economic courts (mbitruzh), were dismissed and distrusted by enterprise managers who believed that real power resided with industrial ministries.80 Nor is this point of view surprising, for although enterprises entered into “contracts” for raw materials and outputs, these were not contracts as would ordinarily be understood in capitalist countries. “Soviet contracts were obligations that flowed from the plan, reflecting an administrative decision of ministerial or planning officials, not a meeting of the minds of the contracting parties.”81

The enterprise’s power in relationship to its workers was also one of relative weakness in the important sense that the dismissal of employees was very difficult. Berliner quotes an engineer from the mid-1960s saying, “I think that it would be desirable to expand the authority of directors and trade unions in the matter of firing inveterate spoilage producers. We are in favor of special rewards to workers, engineers and foreman who produce high-quality output. But we cannot agree with the labor code that makes it impossible to fire a negligent worker even for repeated spoilage.”SZ Again, by 1993 this was changing, and unemployment was growing along with labor militancy.83 Nevertheless, at the time of our survey it is fair to say that the enterprise was a relatively weak corporate actor compared to American and Japanese corporations. To the degree this perception of weakness is shared by Russian citizens, we may expect that they would hold Russian enterprises to a lower standard of care than their American and Japanese counterparts.

79. Id. at 42. 80. Hendley, 5 TransMt’I L. d Contemp. Prob. 43 (cited in note 16). 81. Id. at 52. 82. Joseph S. Berliner, The innovation Decision in Swiet Industry 162-63 (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1976). Paradoxically from a capitalist perspective, the relative inability to release workers was accompanied by a general hoarding of labor by enterprises. Because enterprises were not penalized for high production COSD, hoarded labor posed few real costs. How- ever, the excess workers could prove wful for purposes of “storming,” the practice of increasing production to meet gross output targets at the end of the month. Philip J. Bryson, The Reluctcmt Retreat: The Soviet und E a t German Depcmure f... Central P h n i n g 13 (Brook- field, Vt.: Dartmouth, 1995). The effect of hoarding and the difficulty of discharging unnec- essary or unproductive workers led to considerable underemplovent. In 1991 the labor minister estimated that nationwide the labor surplus was in the neighborhood of 28 million people. Moskoff, Hard T i s 162.

83. Moskoff, Hard T i e s (cited in note 74).


11. METHODS

A. Surveys and Sampling

The surveys were conducted in the spring, summer, and fall of 1993. The Washington, D.C., survey (N = 602) was done over the telephone in the spring and summer." A standard random-digit-dialing method was used to ensure that we reached a random sample of residential phones in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Statistical Area (which includes both Maryland and Virginia suburbs); the response rate was 65%. The Moscow survey (N = 597) was administered face to face in the summer, and the Tokyo survey (N = 600), also face to face, was administered in the summer and fall; their response rates were 70% and 64%, respectively. Both face-to- face surveys, which were carried out in respondents' homes, were probability samples of the respective metropolitan areas. In the case of MOSCOW, the unit is the Oblast, an administrative unit in which the city of Moscow pre- dominates. While results cannot be generalized to Japan, Russia, and the United States as a whole, they probably tap basic similarities and differences in responsibility judgments in each country. Given that cost considerations prohibited national samples, we chose to conduct our surveys in the capitals of the three countries in part because we believed that citizens of these cities are relatively experienced in dealing with bureaucratic hierarchies in private and governmental organizations.

The Appendix provides a brief overview of the demographic characteristics of each sample.

B. Creating the Instrument

The survey instrument was constructed over a period of months in con- sultation with our Japanese and Russian c0lleagues.8~ The survey was centered on a set of experimental vignettes describing wrongdoing inside organizations. Each respondent heard one randomly assigned version of each vignette. This tactic combines the experiment's advantage of clear causal inference with the survey's advantage of wider generalization.86 The

84. The survey was conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland.

85. The Japanese group was lead by Professor Kazuhiko Tokoro from Rikkyo University and included Naotaka Kato, Mikio Kawai, Takashi Kubo, and &NO Nishimura. We had worked with Professors Nishimura and Tokora on earlier collaborations. The Russian colleagues included Gennady Denisovsky, Polina Kozyreva, and Michael Matskovsky, all from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom we had also worked with on an earlier collaboration.

86. The advantage of vignette experiments is the relative clarity of causal inferences. A disadvantage is that judgments with respect to any specific vignette may be partly the result of idiosyncratic factors embedded in the story rather than general underlying decision rules. One


process involved writing and sharing experimental vignettes (described below) and other questions. The three groups then met for a week in Tokyo to discuss tentative drafts of a number of possible vignettes. Some potential vignettes and other questions were rejected because they did not describe plausible situations of wrongdoing in each society or because they did not translate well into all three languages. We also used the meeting to select the experimental manipulations to be introduced into the vignettes. Again, an important consideration was which scales would be most easily understood and interpreted in a similar way by respondents in each country. After the Tokyo meeting we constructed a final English language version of the instrument. The instrument was translated into Japanese and Russian by our colleagues and then back-translated into English by individuals not involved in the original translation. Discrepancies between translations were discussed and resolved. Brief pilot surveys preceded the administration of the main instrument in each city. After data collection, the group had a second meeting in the United States at which we reviewed the findings and once again discussed possible translation explanations for cross-cultural differences.

C. Vignettes

The primary component of each survey was a set of short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by individuals inside corporate hierarchies.87 Each vignette contained a set of experimental manipulations. Each respondent heard four core vignettes involving wrongdoing by actors in corporate hierarchies. Each of these stories manipulated three variables: the mental state of the principal actor in the vignette (generally intentional action vs. negligence) , the actor’s position within the hierarchy (subordinate vs. mid- level authority), and the actor’s autonomy in committing the act (acting alone, acting under orders, or acting collectively with others in the organization). Thus each vignette involved a 2 x 2 x 3 factorial design. The vignettes are briefly described below; vignette names refer to the nature of the wrongdoing.88

1. Factory W’aste: A foreman (or manager) of a fertilizer factory is under pressure to cut costs; his intentional (or negligent) actions (or

way to address this problem is to ask multiple vignettes on basically similar issues. We have adopted that strategy in this study. For general discussions of using vignettes inside surveys, see Peter H. Rossi & Steven L. Nock, eds., Measuring Social ludgments: The Factorial Survey Approach (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1982).

87. In the language of the white-collar crime literature, each of these stories focuses on “organizational crime” as compared to ”occupational crime,” e.g., employee theft (Coleman, Crimind Elite (cited in note 35)).

88. The full text of all versions of all vignettes are available from the authors on request.


order) lead to a toxic waste spill. This story was inspired by numer- ous cases involving corporate pollution, both intentional (e.g., Hooker Chemical at Love Canal, Chisso pollution at Minamata) and unintentional (e.g., Exxon Valdez oil spill),

2. Faulty Design: A design engineer (or the head of the design team) for a new car accidentally (or negligently) fails to carry out (or order) adequate testing because of time pressures. The car has a defect that causes several accidents in which people are injured. This story was inspired by the civil and criminal trials regarding the Ford Pinto’s defective gas tank.

3. Dangerous Drug: A lab technician (or scientist) working on a new drug intentionally (or negligently) fails to carry out adequate tests for side effects in the animals being tested (or order the tests), because of time pressures. A serious side effect, blindness, occurs among a few purchasers of the drug. This story was inspired by nu- merous product liability cases involving the pharmaceutical industry, and especially by the example of the drug MER-29.89

4. Failure to Publicize: A newspaper reporter (or editor) intentionally (or negligently) suppresses (or orders suppression of) information about a company’s toxic waste, because the economy is poor and he is concerned that the company might close down. The waste problem goes unexposed,‘and a later increase in birth defects is traced to the pollution. This story had no exemplar or inspiration in news accounts or court cases.%

D. Independent Variables

Mental State (IntentionfNegligence/Acci&nt): At the high end this manipulation involved committing some act with a likelihood that it might cause harm (e.g., engineers cease testing an engine that was not running smoothly; a newspaper fails to report the storage of industrial waste, even though there is a small chance of leakage). Low mental state typically involved outcomes that were accidents or at most the result of slight negligence (e.g., testing is ceased but there has been no trouble with the new engine; the newspaper does not report the story but has been assured there is no chance of leakage). In the most extreme “high mental state” conditions, the actor’s behavior borders on an intentional wrongful act (see the

89. Stone, Where the Law Ends (cited in note 4). 90. The Failure to Publicize story involves a secondary rather than primary harm. The

newspaper organization is not the creator of the toxic waste. However, wrongdoing by the media (information transmission organizations) would characteristically involve this sort of secondary injury (Failure to Publicize and prevent harm). We anticipated that the average responsibility of the actor in this vignette might be lower for this reason, but we expected that all three variables (type of influence, hierarchy, and mental state) would exert some effect across all vignettes.


factory waste example below), whereas in the most extreme “low mental state” conditions, the consequence appears to be accidental, in that the actor was not negligent in any way.

Hierarchy (SubordiMtelAuthoty) : This manipulation basically involved mentioning the actor’s role. In the preceding descriptions of the vignettes, the actor’s role when he is a subordinate is listed first, followed in parentheses by its alternative, mid-level authority.

Type of Social l n f i m e (None, Conformity, Obeke) : In the no influence condition, the primary actor in the story acted on his own. In the conformity condition, he followed the decision of co-workers. In the obedience condition, he followed the directions of a superior in the organization. This manipulation was more complex to introduce. For example, a Subordinatern0 Influencewigh Mental State version of the Factory Waste story read as follows:

Nick is the foreman in charge of waste disposal at a fertilizer plant. For several months, the plant’s expenses have been running over budget. One time, in order to save money, Nick decides to dump some of the waste into the river next to the plant instead of having it shipped away. The pollution causes some people who live down river to get sick.

For the Orders version, the following was substituted for the italicized sen- tence above: “One time, in order to save money, the plant rnunager teUs Nick to dump chemical waste into the rim next to the plant instead of having it shipped away.” Conformity versions of each story necessitated adding to the introduction in order to set up the conditions for conformity. For example, the Authority/Confonnity/High Mental State version of Factory Waste read:

Nick is the manager of a fertilizer plant and head of the committee that makes production decisions. For several months, the plant’s expenses have been running over budget. One time, in order to save money, the committee decides to order that some of the waste be dumped into the river next to the plant instead of having it shipped away. The pollution causes a few people who live downriver to get sick.

There is an additional important complication concerning the influence manipulation. In the Obedience conditions, the orders given by the boss vary depending on whether the actor was a subordinate or a mid-level authority (the Authority manipulation). When the actor is a subordinate, the boss directly orders the actor to do something. When the actor is himself a mid-level authority, the boss gives much more indirect instructions which are translated into the same action. For example, in the Authority/ Obedi- ence condition of the factory waste story, instead of a plant manager telling Nick to dump the waste, “The company Vice President has told Nick to do


whatever he can to save money, so one time Nick orders some of the waste to be dumped.” We purposely chose to introduce this complexity, because it more nearly reflects the type of orders given at the vice president level and reflects the ambiguity of instructions as the chain of command lengthens. A person’s position in the hierarchy and freedom of action on the job are in fact confounded in real organization^.^^ However, we must take this varia- tion in manipulations into consideration when assessing the meaning of a hierarchy effect on the boss’s responsibility,

E. Dependent Variables

Following each vignette the respondents were asked a number of questions. This analysis focuses on four questions that asked the respondents to rate the responsibility of individuals and entities in the vignettes. The first question asked the respondents to rate the actor’s responsibility on a 100- point scale, where 0 means that the actor is not at all responsible, 50 that the actor is somewhat responsible, and 100 that the actor is fully responsible. The same question was asked about the actor’s co-workers, the actor’s boss, and the company itself. We also assessed whether and how the actor or other participants should be punished. The punishment data are not discussed in this article.

Other items included the seriousness of the consequences (where 0 = not at all serious and 100 - extremely serious), whether the actor “acted on his own” or not ( 1 = yes, 2 = no), and whether the actor could have avoided the injury or not (0 = could not have avoided, 100 = could have avoided).92

111. HYPOTHESES AND RESULTS

The hypotheses suggested by the preceding discussion may be grouped into three categories: the responsibility of the actors in the vignettes, the responsibility of the organization, and differences in the way American, Jap- anese, and Russian respondents allocate responsibility in the vignettes.

91. Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (cited in note 3). 92. The first of these questions was used to assess whether vignettes were comparable in

severity; the second was a manipulation check for influence type; the third was a manipulation check for the actor’s mental state.


A. The Responsibility of the Actors

There are three sets of actors in each of these vignettes: the actor, his co-workers, and the boss.93 We had slightly different hypotheses with respect to the way the independent variables would affect the attribution of responsibility to each type of actor.

1. The Effect of lndependent Variables on the Actor’s Responsibility

We anticipated that all three independent variables would affect the actor’s responsibility. The actor in each vignette would be more responsible in the high mental state condition because individuals are held more responsible for their intentional and negligent acts than for nonnegligent a~ts .~4 We also believed the actor would be held more accountable when he was a superior (mid-level authority) than when he was a subordinate, because superiors tend to be held to a higher standard of care for similar acts of ~rongdoing.9~ Finally, we hypothesized that the actor would be most responsible when he acted on his own and least responsible when following orders. Influence from others, especially superiors, acts as a role excuse lim- iting the actor’s re~ponsibility.~~

In addition, we believed that hierarchy and influence would interact: that the authority actor would be seen as less susceptible to influence from peers (conformity) and higher-ups (obedience) than the subordinate actor. As an individualmoves up the chain of authority he will be perceived to be more of a “principal” who is responsible for his own actions. Therefore, influence from co-workers or the boss will lessen the responsibility of the subordinate more than that of the mid-level manage~~7 Each of these hypotheses was confirmed with the single exception that there was no influence effect and no hierarchy-influence interaction in the Failure to Publicize vignette. These results are presented in Table l.98

93. As in other situations of multiple wrongdoers, it is possible that each person will be adjudged fully responsible for what happened. In this sense, there can be more than 100% responsibility for an untoward act.

94. Shaver, Atnibution of Bhme (cited in note 17); Hamilton & Sanders, EvetydqJustice 111 (cited in note 8).

95. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday justice 114. 96. Id. at 111. 97. In addition, we believed that the general nature of the instructions given in the

authority/obedience conditions would offer the actor a weaker excuse of just following orders. 98. The F-statistics presented in tables 1-4 are from ANOVA analyses that includes the

three experimental variables and nation (Japan, Russia, United States). We have included nation in these analyses because, as we shall see below, this variable has a substantial effect on many responsibility judgments. Excluding nation from the analyses slightly alters the F-statistics. No effects that are not significant with nation in the models become significant when it is excluded. Two effects that are significant with nation included fail to reach significance when it is excluded: the mental state-influence interaction effect on co-worker responsibility


TABLE 1 The Effect of the Experimental Variables on the Actor’s Responsibility (F Statistic)

Vignette Factory Faulty Dangerous Failure to waste Design Publicize

Mental state 39.0** 6.7** 56.4** 14.3**

Influence 64.7** 79.8** 48.6** 2.6 Hierarchy/influence interaction 14.4** 13.8** 27.1** 0.6 N 1,654 1,625 1,647 1,616

Hierarchy 62.1** 71.2** 87.4** 45.4**

NOTE: With respect to the influence effect, the actor is most responsible in the autonomy condition and least responsible in the obedience condition.

** p < .01 * p < .05

2. The Effect of the Independent Variables on Coworker Responsibility

With respect to co-workers, we anticipated there would be a hierarchy effect and an influence effect. The hierarchy effect would be the same as for the actor, and for the same reason. Because the co-workers would themselves be further up the chain of distribution, they would be held more responsible for the same actions. With respect to influence, however, we expected the co-workers to be most responsible in the conformity condition where they participated in the decision to commit the act. We did not expect a mental state effect because the co-workers have no mental state in the autonomy and obedience influence conditions. We did anticipate, however, that there might be a mental state/ influence interaction: that is, in the conformity condition where the co-workers participated in the decision, there would be a mental state effect. When the co-workers participated in an intentional or negligent decision, they would be held more responsible

in the Factory Waste vignette (table 2) and the influence effect on company responsibility in the Dangerous Drug vignette (table 4). In addition, the effect of hierarchy on boss responsibility in the Faulty Design vignette is significant at .05, not .01 (table 3).

We have presented F-statistics in this and subsequent tables for the sake of parsimony. Some readers, however, may gain a better feel for the data by knowing how these values translate into differences in means. The means (on a 100-point scale) for actor responsibility in the Factory Waste story are as follows: mental state: low = 78, high = 85; hierarchy: subordinate = 77, authority = 86; influence: obedience = 74, conformity = 80; autonomy = 89. The smallest significant difference reported in this table, the F of 6.7 for the mental state effect in the Faulty Design vignette, represents a mean difference of four points (low = 61, high = 65).


than when they participated in a nonnegligent decision. In fact, contrary to our expectations, there was main effect for mental state in two vignettes (Dangerous Drug and Failure to Publicize). In both cases the main effect was due to the fact that the co-workers were assigned more responsibility in the high mental state versus low mental state conditions in both the conformity and obedience conditions. In neither of these vignettes did mental state affect attributions of co-worker responsibility in the autonomy condition. In only two vignettes (Factory Waste and Dangerous Drug) did we observe the expected interaction between mental state and influence. See Table 2 for the full results.

TABLE 2 The Effect of the Experimental Variables on the Co-worker’s Responsibility (F Statistic)

Factory Faulty Dangerous Failure to Waste Design Publicize

Mental state 1.6 2.4 16.2** 4.4* Hierarchy 3.4 12.8** 35.7** 34.2** Influence 138.0** 24.1** 48.2** 55.4** Mental state/influence interaction 5.6* 0.8 3.5* 1.3 N 1,581 1,597 1,591 1,535

NOTE: With respect to the influence effect, the coworkers is most responsible in the conform-

* p < .05 ity condition. The factory waste hierarchy effect is marginally significant (p. < .07)

** p < .01

3. The Effect of the 1d- t Variables on Boss Responsibility

The effect of the independent variables on the Boss’s Responsibility are presented in table 3. We again anticipated an influence effect on the boss’s responsibility. With respect to this effect, we expected the boss to be held most responsible in the obedience condition and least responsible in the autonomy condition, the opposite of the actor’s responsibility. We thought that the boss’s responsibility in the conformity condition would lie somewhere between the other two because the wrongful act of a group of his employees would be seen as a more fundamental breach of his role responsibility to supervise his subordinates than would the wrongful act of a single subordinate. These hypotheses were confirmed with one exception. In the Faulty Design vignette, the boss’s responsibility was similar in the autonomy and conformity conditions.


TABLE 3 The Effect of the Experimental Variables on the Boss’s Responsibility (F Statistic)

vignette

Factory Faulty Dangerous Failure to Wate Design b e Publicize

Mental state 0.97 0.01 0.07 7.6**

Influence 7.3** 10.7** 31.0** 51.6** N 1,617 1,620 1,620 1,561

Hierarchy 21.1** 6.7** 11.1** 39.4**

NOTE: With respect to the hierarchy effect, the boss is more responsible in the subordinate condition in the Factory Waste, Faulty Design, and Dangerous DNg vignettes; the boss is more responsible in the “superior“ condition in the Failure to Publicize vignette. With respect to the influence effect, the bass is most responsible in the obedience condition and least responsible in the autonomy condition.

* p < .05 ** p < .01

We were less certain of the nature of any hierarchy effect. Recall that in the subordinate condition, the boss’s influence is in the form of a direct order to a subordinate, whereas in the authority condition, it is in the form of announcing a policy to a lower, mid-level authority. There are, therefore, competing considerations working on the boss’s responsibility in this situation. On the one hand, the “superior” boss is further up the chain of command, and we might expect as with the primary actor in the story this would lead to an attribution of more responsibility. On the other hand, because the boss’s connection to the untoward event is much weaker in the authority condition, this might diminish his responsibility. In fact in every vignette there was a Hierarchy effect. However, in three of the four vignettes-Factory Waste, Faulty Design, and Dangerous Drug-the effect was in the opposite direction from the hierarchical effect on actor and the co-worker responsibility. The boss was kss responsible in the authority condition. The vagueness of the orders played a greater role than the boss’s position in the firm.99

W e did not anticipate a mental state effect for the same reason we did not expect one for co-workers. The boss has no mental state in the Auton- omy and Conformity condition. We did think that, as with co-workers, if there were any mental state effect, it might be by way of a mental state/ influence interaction, that is, there would be a mental state effect in the

99. The “superior” boss in the Failure to Publicize story was held more responsible than the “subordinate” boss.


obedience condition. This was not the case in any of the vignettes.’W Even in those vignette versions where the boss directed the actor’s behavior, the mental state manipulation did not significantly affect attributions of responsibility to the boss. By and large the boss is being judged mostly on the factor that relates to his role as a principal: his influence over others.

In sum, most of our hypotheses were confirmed. The existence of a hierarchy does not excuse actors from responsibility for their deeds. The actor’s mental state still affects how much responsibility is attributed to him. However, responsibility for wrongdoing inside a hierarchy is strongly affected by one’s position within the hierarchy and the types of influence he exerts and/or has exerted on him.

B. The Responsibility of the Organization

How do respondents judge the organization itself? Within the context of our surveys, this question may be broken into two issues: the direct effect of the independent variables on corporate responsibility and the effect of natural person responsibility on company responsibility.

1. The Direct Effect of the Independent Variubks

We did not expect a main effect for mental state on corporate responsibility. The manipulation primarily refers to the behavior of the actor, not his superiors. If corporate responsibility is influenced more by the behavior of superiors than by the behavior of subordinates, a low-level actor’s intentional wrongdoing should have a small impact on corporate responsibility. Moreover, higher mental state may under some circumstances limit corporate responsibility because it does not involve the company as an object self. For example, in the high mental state, subordinate actor, autonomy condition of our vignettes, the fact that the actor acted alone and negligently in some ways relieves the company of all but vicarious liability. The actor’s deed is not the company’s action.

We did anticipate that the role variables (hierarchy and influence) would have an effect on corporate responsibility. With respect to the influence variable, the corporate actor would be judged most responsible when superiors gave orders and least responsible in the no influence condition.

100. There were two significant mental state/influence interactions, in the Factory Waste and Dangerous Drug vignettes, but neither supported our hypothesis. In the Factory Waste case, there was a mental state effect in the conformity condition, but not in the obedience condition. In the Dangerous Drug vignette, the interaction was also partly due to a mental state effect in the conformity condition and partly due to the fact that in the autonomy condition the boss was held less responsible in the high mental state condition than in the low mental state condition. Both of these results can be explained in a post hoc fashion, but they clearly do not support our hypothesis.


Influencing subordinates is the fundamental act of a principal, and if corporate actors are judged as principals, then influence should affect their responsibility. We also anticipated a hierarchy effect, on the hypothesis that corporate actors are more responsible for the actions of people further up the chain of command. Table 4 presents the effects of the independent variables on company responsibility in the four vignettes. With respect to company responsibility, the Failure to Publicize vignette clearly differs from the other three. In this story mental state, hierarchy, and influence all significantly affect judgments of corporate responsibility. In the other three vignettes there is no effect for mental state and, more surprisingly, there is no hierarchy effect and an influence effect only in the dangerous drug vignette.

TABLE 4 The Effect of the Experimental Variables on the Company’s Responsibility (F Statistic)

Factory Faulty Dangerous Failure to Waste Design h g Publicii

Mental state 0.02 0.3 1.9 12.8** Hierarchy 2.4 2.2 0.9 32.8** Influence 1.3 0.3 3.9* 16.2** N 1,596 1,616 1,600 1,535

NOTE: In the Failure to Publicize story the company is more responsible in the “high mental state” condition and in the “superior” condition. With respect to the influence effect, in the Fail- ure to Publicize vignette the company is most responsible in the obedience condition and least responsible in the autonomy condition.

* p < .05 ** p < .01

A review of the effect of the role variables on the actor, co-workers, and the boss suggests why we got this result in these vignettes. The role variables had a counteracting effect on the responsibility of these actors. With respect to hierarchy, because of the realistic way in which we introduced the influence’manipulation, in most vignettes the actor and co-workers are most responsible in the authority condition whereas the boss is most responsible in the subordinate condition. Because the hierarchy manipulation caused boss responsibility to go down in those situations where actor and co-worker responsibility rose, the overall impact of the manipulation on the corporation appears to have been neutralized. In the one vignette where we did observe a hierarchy effect on corporate responsibility (Failure to Publicize), the hierarchy manipulation worked in the same direction for all actors: actor responsibility, co-worker responsibility, and boss responsibility


went up in the superior condition. Likewise, influence is an important de- terminant of responsibility for the actor, the co-workers, and the boss but often in opposite directions that neutralize overall responsibility. The actor is most responsible in the autonomy condition, the co-workers are most responsible in the conformity condition, and the boss is most responsible in the obedience condition.

The influence and hierarchy effects that do exist suggest that insofar as the independent role variables have any direct effect on the company's responsibility, it is dqie to a perception that the agents higher up in the company's hierarchy have done wrong. The two influence effects are the result of greater company responsibility in the obedience and conformity condition than in the autonomy condition, and the hierarchy effect in the Fail- ure to Publicize story is the result of an attribution of more responsibility in the authority condition. Nevertheless, the general conclusion we might draw from table 4 is that within the context of our vignettes, the independent variables have little direct effect on company responsibility.

2. The Effect of Natural Person Responsibility on Comparnr RespOtlSibility

Although the effects of the independent variables on company responsibility are weak, they do suggest that the corporate actor is thought to be more responsible when the people inside the company are more responsible. The responsibility of the company/principal is a function of the responsibility of its actor/agents.

In order to further explore this perspective, we ran four multiple regressions: one for each vignette. The dependent variable in each regression is company responsibility. The independent variables include actor responsibility, co-worker responsibility, and boss responsibility. In addition we included four variables representing the experimental variables: mental state, hierarchy, and two variables to represent Influence. Influence (linear) is coded -1 = no influence, 0 = conformity, 1 = obedience. It represents the linear effect of influence. Influence (conformity) is coded -1 = no influence, 2 = conformity, -1 = obedience. It represents the effect of conformity compared to the other two conditions (the quadratic effect). The linear effect is the effect we primarily observed on actor responsibility and boss responsibility, while the conformity effect is the effect we anticipate on co- worker responsibility.10' We also entered two dummy variables to represent nation effects: one for Japan and one for the United States. Russia is the excluded category.'O* The four regressions are presented in table 5. Because

101. See Jacob Cohen & Patricia Cohen, Applied Mula& Regression/Cmekuion Analysis

102. Id. at 83-198. for the i3ehnwd Scimces 198-217 (2d ed. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1983).


many of the variables in the analysis are coded on arbitrary scales, beta weights (standardized coefficients) are added to table 5.

TABLE 5 Regression Results for the Effect of Independent Variables, Natural Actor’s Responsibility and Nation on Corporate Responsibility

A. Factory Waste 3. Faulty Design

b P b B Mental state -.49 -.01 .I0 .003 Hierarchy .38 .01 .25 .008 Influence (linear) .27 .007 -1.22 -.03 Influence (quadratic) -.83 -.04 .56 .03 Actor responsibility -.03 -.02 -.01 -.01 Co-worker responsibility .12 .13*** .ll .11***

United States (dummy) 9.12 .39*** 7.27 .33*** (Constant) 37.07 39.55

Boss responsibility .45 .38*** .45 .41*** Japan (dummy) 11.27 *48*** 10.26 .46***

R2 = .38 N = 1,531

R2 = .37 N = 1,558

c. Dangerous Drug D. Failure to Publicize

b P b P

Mental state -1.50 -.05* 1.87 .05** Hierarchy .008 .ooo .93 .02 Influence (linear) -.94 -.02 -.45 -.01 Influence (quadratic) .80 .03 -.14 -.005 Actor responsibility -.003 -.003 .02 .02 Co-worker responsibility .10 .11*** .21 .19*** Boss responsibility .48 .41*** .61 .58*** Japan (dummy) 8.96 .38*** 7.27 .27*** United States (dummy) 7.07 .30*** 5.35 .20***

(Constant) 32.64 7.07 R2 = .34

N = 1,531 R2 = .53

N = 1,456

* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .a31

All four regressions tell basically the same story. At the .01 level of significance, there is one direct effect of the independent variables on company responsibility, a mental state effect in the Failure to Publicize st0ry.103 The factors that affect the responsibility of the natural actors in the organization are, at best, weak direct predictors of company responsibility. As we

103. One effect is significant at .05 but not at .01. In the Dangerous Drug vignette, there is a negative effect of mental state on company responsibility.


noted earlier, for hierarchy and influence, this is largely due to the fact that they have counteracting effects on the responsibility of the actors. These independent variables work in a counteracting fashion: as they push up as- sessments of responsibility for one actor, they lower it for another. There- fore, with respect to the overall responsibility of the company, the effects cancel each other. The independent variables do, however, have indirect effects because they affect the attribution of responsibility of natural actors and company responsibility is a function of the responsibility of its agents.

All actors are not equal, however. The effect of boss responsibility on company responsibility is much larger than the effect of co-worker responsibility, which in turn is stronger than actor responsibility. Indeed, while there is a significant zero-order correlation between actor responsibility and company responsibility in three stories, when actor responsibility is entered into a model with the other responsibility variables, it does not have a significant independent effect on company responsibility.’@+ The responsibility of actors higher in the hierarchy, actors who themselves are more than mere agents, has a greater impact on corporate responsibility. This certainly conforms to our commonsense understanding that the wrongdoing of a vice president implicates a company more than the wrongdoing of a foreman.

C. Societal Differences

1. Difierences in Judging the Corporate Actor

Each of the four regressions in the four sections of table 5 indicates a large positive effect for both the United States and Japanese dummy variables. As these effects suggest, the Russian respondents assess significantly less responsibility to the company than do the Americans or the Japa- nese.Io5 This does not reflect a general pattern of responses on all of the

104. Actor responsibility and company responsibility are significantly correlated (.01) in the Faulty Design, Dangerous Drug, and Failure to Publicize vignettes.

105. Here and elsewhere in this report we have given a substantive interpretation to cross-national differences in means. One must be very cautious when doing this. The problem is one of establishing equivalence (Adam Pneworski & Henry Teune, The Logic of Compara- tive Social Inquiry 113-30 (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger Publishing. Co., 1982) (“Przeworski & Teune, Logic”); Nihar R. Mrinal, Uma Singhal Mrinal, & Harold Takooshian, “Research Methods for Studies in the Field,” in Leonore Loeb Adler & Uwe P. Gielen, eds, Cross CUG turd Topics in Psychology 2 5 4 0 (Westport, C~M.: Praeger, 1994). Observed differences might simply be due to factors such as national differences in the way the scales are understood or subtle differences in translations.

As F‘rzeworski and Teune, Logic 119, note, the problem of equivalence is not unique to cross-cultural work. With respect to many questions, “establishing equivalence of measure- ment . . . is probably no more problematic for a study of Russians and Americans than for one of American whites and blacks.”

Several considerations cause us to be willing to give a substantive interpretation to the differences in corporate responsibility scores. First, of course, these scores are responses to a known stimulus: the vignettes. We and our collaborators invested considerable effort to en-


dependent variables. As can be seen in the last row of data in table 6, while the Russians assign less responsibility to the company, they do not assign significantly less responsibility to the ~ t u r a l actors in the stories than do respondents from other countries. How might we understand this consistent pattern across all four vignettes?

If corporate actors are judged according to the same decision rules that govern the judgment of people, lower levels of perceived autonomy and power should translate into lower levels of responsibility attribution for similar acts. From this perspective, the corporate actors in capitalist societies are clearly more autonomous than Russian enterprises. To be sure, their autonomy is not unbounded. Many Japanese firms are tied to one another through keiretsu, creating what Gerlach calls “alliance capitalism.”l% Within the United States, many small and mid-size firms are effectively captured by larger enterprises that take nearly all of their output. However, in Russia, as we discussed above, state enterprises were far less autonomous than their Western counterparts. Soviet enterprises did not stand in the same superordinate position as corporations in capitalist societies.

To the degree Russian respondents perceive enterprises as less autonomous, this should translate into lower levels of responsibility attribution for

~ ~

sure as much as possible that the vignettes would be understood similarly in each society. Second, as we discuss below in the text, we do not observe an overall pattern of lower means for Russian respondents on other responsibility variables. All responsibility variables (e.g., actor responsibility, co-worker responsibility, boss responsibility, corporate responsibility) shared the same basic structure and used the same 0-100 scale. If the Russian questions were subtly different in their meaning, or if Russians used the scale in a different way, we should have observed this in all the questions.

Third, we asked respondents in all countries to rate the seriousness of the consequences of what happened on a (1-100 scale. We were concerned that Russian respondents might view the pollution vignettes as involving less serious outcomes than would American respondents. Differences in attributions of responsibility might, therefore, be due to differences in perceived seriousness. We found, however, that on average Russian respondents assigned “seriousness” scores similar to respondents in the other two countries. Below are the means for each country for each story.

Seriousness Rating Factory Faulty Dangerous Failure to Waste Design Publicize

Russia 93.3 89.5 96.1 95.7 Japan 95.8 92.3 96.5 95.4 United States 87.3 86.8 93.7 91.7

Of course, one could argue that the response to all these scales may be affected by the different ways they are used across societies. However, the existence of multiple common indicators replicated in each of the three cities allows us to look for differences in patterns of responses or patterns of relationships among more than one variable. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice 120; Pneworski &a Teune, Logic. Ultimately, the issue is whether a set of hypotheses are confirmed in a way that makes nonsuhstantive explanations (e.g., problems with translations) implausible.

106. Gerlach, Alliance Copitalsm (cited in note 6).

848 LA.. AND SOCIAL INQUIRY

TABLE 6 Mean Responsibility Scores for Actor, Co-workers, Boss, and Company for Japan, Russia, and the United States (Ns in parentheses)

Vignette

Factory Faulty Dangerous Failureto Wpste Design Publicize

Actor responsibility Japan 76.1 (597)** 60.6 (589) 72.0 (593) 54.7 (579)** United States 82.0 (600) 61.8 (594) 72.9 (591) 63.7 (600) RUSSia 80.3 (590) 64.0 (573) 74.5 (584) 69.3 (583)

Japan 49.6 (561)** 39.1 (591)** 57.4 (565) 31.0 (536)** United States 59.8 (588) 51.8 (559) 58.8 (585) 45.2 (583) RUSSia 48.1 (562) 44.3 (575) 42.6 (561) 37.5 (562)

Japan 75.0 (578)** 71.1 (595)** 76.2 (575)** 58.7 (548)** United States 82.5 (595) 80.9 (574) 82.0 (596) 65.7 (592) RUSSia 79.3 (573) 75.1 (583) 75.8 (570) 65.1 (566)

Japan 88.2 (587) 89.1 (583)** 85.4 (582)* 60.4 (552) United States 86.4 (598) 85.0 (5%) 82.1 (593) 61.8 (594) RUSSia 55.8 (541)t 60.2 (570)t 56.9 (546)t 43.5 (533)t

Co-worker responsibility

Boss responsibility

Company responsibility

* A significant difference between Japanese and American mean (p < .05). ** A significant difference between Japanese and American mean (p c .01). t A significant difference benveen the Russian and the other two country means (p e .01).

similar acts. This interpretation is consistent with Hans’s finding that American respondents assign less responsibility to nonprofit organizations than they do to business corporations for the same act of wrongdoing.107 Further research is needed, however, to see whether general perceptions of corporate power and autonomy systematically affect attributions of responsibility to corporate actors.

2. Differences in Judging Natural Actors

If Japanese are more likely than Americans to perceive the individual to be constrained by his or her contextual situation, they should assign individuals in our vignettes less responsibility than do Americans. We thought the Russian judgments might fall somewhere between the other two countries but given the unstable situation in Russia in 1993, we had no firm

107. Valerie Hans, “Lay Judgments of Corporate Defendants” (presented at Law & Soci- ety Association annual meeting, Phoenix, Ariz., June 1994).

Distributing Responsibility &)9

hypothesis. The Japanese and American responses confirm our hypothesis about the differences between these two societies. Generally, American respondents assign more responsibility to the natural actors than do the Japa- nese. Table 6 presents the mean Japanese, American, and Russian scores for each of the four dependent variables for each vignette. With respect to the responsibility of the natural actors (actor responsibility, co-worker responsibility, and boss responsibility), 9 of the 12 means differ significantly and the remaining 3 are in the same direction. Throughout, the Americans assign more responsibility to natural actors, while the Japanese assign less. It is worth noting that the Japanese responsibility attributions are lower not only for the actor and co-worker but also for the boss. Across all levels of the organization the Japanese assign less responsibility to natural actors. In con- trast, note that with respect to the firm (the collective entity) the Japanese generally assigned more, not less, responsibility.

The Russians present a more complex picture. An inspection of table 6 reveals that the Russians assign more responsibility to the actor than the Japanese. In all but one vignette they assign more responsibility to the actor than the American respondents as well, although not significantly so. With respect to co-worker responsibility, the Russian respondents either fall between the Japanese and American respondents (Faulty Design and Failure to Publicize vignettes) or assign even less responsibility than the Japanese (Factory Waste and Dangerous Drug vignettes). Russian responsibility scores for the boss always fall between those of the Japanese and American respondents.

These results are consistent with what we would predict if the Japanese had a stratified contextual conception of the self and the Americans an equal individual conception (see fig. 1) . While on average the Russian respondents fall between the other two sets of respondents, we are reluctant to conclude that this is evidence for any particular cultural orientation or conception of the self. The volatility of the Russian responses may simply reflect a society in flux.

IV. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

In this section we review the main findings and discuss their implications for understanding the general processes by which individuals assess responsibility.

A. Responsibility in Organizations

The results of this study build on and replicate earlier research findings that the attribution of responsibility is influenced both by what an actor


does and the position the actor occupies. They offer further support for a general attribution model based on deeds and roles.lo8 They also confirm earlier findings that individuals are particularly sensitive to the relative power of the actor and others when judging wrongdoing inside organizations. lo9

In Clinard and Yeager’s terms, people also are aware of “the problem of causality” that exists with respect to many acts of corporate This is especially clear with respect to the responsibility of the boss, who is on average assigned less responsibility when he gives indirect orders like “Do whatever you can to save money” than when he gives specific insnuctions. These results confirm the prosecutor’s intuition that convicting upper-level officials for corporate crimes is made more difficult by the causal ambiguity created by a chain of command.

If causal ambiguity may shield superiors from responsibility for thee acts of their subordinates, our results also confirm that subordinates are able to deflect responsibility because they are following orders from superiors or because they are conforming to a group consensus. This was especially true with respect to lower-level employees, as reflected in the significant hierarchy/influences interaction effect on actor responsibility in three of the four vignettes (see table 1).

More fundamentally, our research lends strong support to Coleman’s insight that bureaucratic hierarchies split individuals into an object self and an acting self. The directed subordinate is held less responsible because he is perceived to have lost, to a greater or lesser extent, that aspect of the self which is the object of action. His defense, “I was not acting for myself, ” resonates with our respondents.

As to superiors, the fact that they did not personally act may lessen their responsibility when it is not clear that the subordinate is acting under specific instructions. On the other hand, superiors are perceived to be object selves: benefiting from, and responsible for, the acts of subordinates. As can be seen in table 6, the mean responsibility assigned to the boss is equal to or greater than the mean responsibility assigned to the actor in every vignette. This is the case even though the boss is not directly implicated in the wrongdoing in the autonomy and conformity conditions.

In sum, the responsibility of actors for organizational wrongdoing is limited by the expanded array of excuses available to them because of the existence of a hierarchy. It is wrong to view these excuses as only a set of clever pleadings advanced by organizational actors who know that they are responsible for some untoward event. Nobody in our vignettes actually offered any of the excuses discussed here. Our respondents supplied them, and

108. Hamilton & Sanders, Everyday Justice (cited in note 8). 109. Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (cited in note 3). 110. Clinard & Yeager, Corporate C7ime 281 (cited in note 2).


they did so because they recognize that actions inside hierarchies are in one sense the result of the individual actions of a set of “partial selves” who are not full moral agents.

Fisse and Braithwaite argue that successful responsibility regimes mini- mize the mismatch between corporate principles of accountability and legal principles of responsibility.’’l To the degree this is the case, these results suggest that legal approaches to corporate crime that disregard the fragmentation of the self and accompanying fragmentation of responsibility that occurs within corporate hierarchies will be relatively less successful. This is especially true of rational actor models that treat all embedded in an organization as equal free contractors.”* It is important to note that this is as true for superordinates as subordinates. Not only do our respondents honor role excuses based on following orders, they also appear to reject what Fisse and Braithwaite (1993: 113) call “captain of the ship” responsibility, where the senior executive officer is held responsible for organizational wrongdoing regardless of the senior executive’s involvement.”’ This is reflected in the relatively lower levels of responsibility assigned to the boss in the authority versions of most of the vignettes. These bosses are higher in the hierarchy than the bosses in the subordinate versions, but their involvement is less direct. Our respondents implicitly recognize the substantial principal-agent problems that sometimes confront superiors. Superiors do not always fully control “their acts,” that is, the acts of their agents. Superiors, like subordinates, are “partial selves” when placed in hierarchies.

B. Responsibility of Organizations

When discussing just deserts for corporate criminals, Schlegel asks whether a doctrine of corporate fault based on organizational policies and procedures will be more or less effective than a doctrine based on concepts such as vicarious liability which do not attend to the internal decision making of the organization.114 Our data cannot answer this broad question, but they do show that people in all three of our societies do not employ a pure vicarious liability model in judging the organization.115 Imposing liability in this way may produce more deterrence than responsibility models that are based on what the corporation’s personnel have done, but only at the ex- pense of violating the decision rules people ordinarily employ when judging corporate actors.

~~ ~~ ~

111. Fisse & Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime 123 (cited in note 5). 112. Id. at 96; Hamilton & Sanders, “Responsibility & Risk” (cited in note 25). 113. Fisse & Braithwaite, Curpuratiom, Crime 113. 114. Schlegel, Just Deserts 86 (cited in note 36). 115. The correlation between outcome seriousness and corporate actor responsibility

ranges from .05 to .005 in our four stories. Outcome seriousness alone explains almost none of the variance in the corporate responsibility measure.


Our results are consistent with a view of the corporation as the alter ego of its managers. The attribution of responsibility to the corporation is highly correlated with the responsibility of the boss. A particularly interest- ing outcome is that contrary to our expectations the hierarchy and influence manipulations did not directly affect the attribution of corporate responsibility in three of our four vignettes.116 In one sense, the lack of a hierarchy effect is an artifact of the way we constructed our vignettes. Had we constructed our stories so that the boss gave equally specific orders to his subordinate regardless of the hierarchical position of the boss and actor, individuals would almost certainly have attributed more responsibility to the boss in the authority versions than in the subordinate versions of the vignettes, Because corporate responsibility is largely a function of the responsibility of the boss, this would have produced a hierarchy effect on corporate responsibility. We believe, however, that the way we manipulated influence in these different situations conforms to the way influence is actually exerted inside organizations.

Importantly, manipulating influence in this way has allowed us to see that responsibility is not simply a function of how high up in the company wrongdoing reaches. If this were the case, we should have observed a hierarchy effect regardless of the level of responsibility attributed to the boss. We did not. Simply implicating higher-ups in some general way with an act of wrongdoing does not automatically translate into attribution of greater responsibility to the firm. The ambiguities involved in the way many higher- level instructions are issued does reduce the level of attribution of responsibility to the organization. More generally, the diffusion of responsibility that frequently occurs within hierarchies does lower attributions to organizations.

Individuals judge the company as most responsible when the superiors in the firm are most responsible, and the superiors are judged most responsible when they are doing things that involve the organization as an organization, giving direct, specific orders and exerting influence to conform. In this respect, our results support Coleman’s view of the organization as an object

~ ~ __ _ _ _ ~

116. In this regard the Failure to Publicize story is intriguing. We intended to manipulate the boss’s influence the same way in all four stories: in the authority version the orders were less specific. However, in this story the boss in the authority versions of the vignette was held more responsible than the boss in the subordinate versions. Differences in the way we manipulated the boss’s influence in the various stories do not appear to account for this difference in attributions. In the subordinate versions the respondents were told, “Jim talks the problem over with his editor, and the editor tells him not to write a story about the waste because it might cause the factory to close and hurt the town’s economy.” In the authority versions they were told, “The Editor-in-Chief has told Jim that he should not publish stories that might hurt the economy of the town.”

In a future report we plan to explore the possibility that the nature of the organization, whether it is professiofial or buram&, may have helped to produce this result (Fisse &a Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime 105-6; Peter Blau, “The Hierarchy of Authority in Organiza- tions,” 73 Am. J. SOC. 453 (1968).


self: a self that is held most responsible for directing others in wrongdoing.117 Organizations are held most responsible when their policies and op- erations, implemented by organizational superiors, suggest an internal decision structure that leads to acts of wrongdoing.’l* Responsibility schemes that calibrate sanctions based on the nature and adequacy of the organization’s internal control structures will more nearly conform to the decision rules apparently used by our respondents.

C . National Differences

Finally, we offer a few comments on the national differences in our results. Russians assign less responsibility to enterprises than the Japanese and American respondents assign to corporations. We interpret this result as a reflection of the relative lack of power and autonomy of these organizations within the Russian legal and economic system. Because Japanese corporations are more fully enmeshed in a network of regulation and government control than are United States corporations, we had initially thought we might observe a difference between these two countries as well, with people from the United States assigning more responsibility to corporations than the Japanese. This is not the case. Perhaps the gulf between judgments in these two societies and Russia is due in part to the fact that socialist enterprises are not as fully invested with “personhood” as are capitalist corporations. For many purposes corporations are legal “persons” in capitalist societies. Clearly, they are also perceived to be moral “persons” that are responsible for the acts of their agent/employees. In the most extreme cases, this can produce attributions of very high levels of responsibility for the largest and most powerful corporations, as wimess the general response to the Exxon Valdez spill. Our scenarios did not attempt to directly manipulate the power and autonomy of the organizations. More research that focuses on the effect of perceived power and autonomy on levels of corporate responsibility would be welcome.

Japanese and American respondents differed in their attribution of responsibility to the natural actors in the vignettes. Consistent with the view that the Japanese are more likely to emphasize the contextual and hierarchical aspect of individual acts, they assign less responsibility to the people in these vignettes than do the Americans. These results again reinforce the conclusion that there are real, persistent cultural differences in the perception of actors and the attribution of responsibility. These differences are not simply a function of differences in perceptions of how easily subordinates can resist organizational pressures in the form of influence from others.

117. Coleman, Foundations (cited in note 24). 118. French, Cok&e/Corpate Responsibility (cited in note 5).


Were this so, we might observe differences in the attribution of responsibility to subordinate actors but not to their superiors. The fact that the Japa- nese and Americans differ in the amount of responsibility they assign to all the natural actors in the story suggests that the cultural differences are more deep seated.

For Japanese, more than for Americans, conformity with the interests of the group is a virtue, not a flaw. The type of commitment fostered in the Japanese workplace is captured in the concept of sum. A s u m adult is obedient, prone to accept others, dependent, not self-centered, honest, and free from antagonisms.l*9 This combination of personal characteristics is not a goal in the United States, but in Japanese culture to be s u m is a complex and positive character trait. For those who see s u m as a virtue, an individual’s failure to act contrary to the organizational interest, even when the individual is committing an act of wrongdoing, may be seen as less blameworthy.

Recall, however, that Japanese and American respondents did not differ in their attributions of responsibility to the organization. Overall, compared with their counterparts in the United States, Japanese respondents assign less responsibility to individuals but equal levels of responsibility to the organization. In this respect the Japanese respondents seem to be out of phase with Japanese law, which rarely holds the organization responsible. I t is not surprising that this approach has at times met with criticism in Ja- pan.12o We are not sufficiently familiar with the history and justification of the Japanese approach to corporate crime to do more than comment on this apparent mismatch between formal legal rules and widely shared views of corporate responsibility in Japan. Further research on this issue is needed.

D. Conclusion

In sum, these results have implications for both applied and basic research questions. With respect to applied research, they help us to understand which sanctioning regimes may be more or less acceptable methods of controlling wrongdoing inside organizations. Subordinates often say, when being held accountable, “I was only following orders.” Superiors often say, “I never told [the subordinate] to do that.” The law disregards these pleas at its peril, for our data suggest that these pleas reflect a view of action within corporations that is widely shared by individuals in our three societies.

These results speak to more basic research issues as well. Understand- ing how and why individuals assign more or less responsibility to corporate

119. T. Murase, “‘Sunao’: A Central Value in Japanese Psychotherapy,” in A. J. Marsella & G. M. White, eds., Cultural Conceptions of Mental Heawl and Therapy (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1982).

120. Fisse & Braithwaite, COTporations, Crime 123 (cited in note 5).


actors is part of the general question of how natural persons perceive and react to the acts of corporate actors. Understanding similarities and differences in the way people judge human and corporate actors offers a better insight into the dimensions of responsibility judgment and the social psychology of human-corporate actor interactions.

APPENDIX Demographic and Occupational Profiles of the Washington, Tokyo, and Moscow Samples

united states Japan Russia (Washington, D.C.) (Tokyo) (Moscow)

Demographic information: Age (in years) 39.8 41.5 41.4 Gender (% female) 50.0 48.2 52.6

Less than high school 4.0 12.3 14.2 High school graduate 20.9 40.5 26.8 Some college 24.9 22.8 25.3

Education:

College grad/postgraduate 50.2 24.3 33.7

OWna 10.0 15.5 5.5 Upper management 12.1 4.5 7.4 Lower management 18.4 11.8 14.1 Worker 38.4 37.7 44.7 Other 22.1 30.5 28.3

Employed full-time 68.4 57.8 68.2

Type of employer:

socia class:

Job characteristics:

Years worked for current employer 8.1 11.2 10.0

Private 55.9 90.9 13.2 Government 37.6 6.8 80.1 Other 7.5 2.3 6.7

a The educational differences among countries are substantial. However, when we controlled for education, the country differences discussed here remain.

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