Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds or An Anthropological Critique of Development

Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds: How Corporations Evade Criminality

Author: William S Laufer

We live in an era defined by corporate greed and malfeasance—one in which unprecedented accounting frauds and failures of compliance run rampant. In order to calm investor fears, revive perceptions of legitimacy in markets, and demonstrate the resolve of state and federal regulators, a host of reforms, high-profile investigations, and symbolic prosecutions have been conducted in response. But are they enough?
In this timely work, William S. Laufer argues that even with recent legal reforms, corporate criminal law continues to be ineffective. As evidence, Laufer considers the failure of courts and legislatures to fashion liability rules that fairly attribute blame for organizations. He analyzes the games that corporations play to deflect criminal responsibility. And he also demonstrates how the exchange of cooperation for prosecutorial leniency and amnesty belies true law enforcement. But none of these factors, according to Laufer, trumps the fact that there is no single constituency or interest group that strongly and consistently advocates the importance and priority of corporate criminal liability. In the absence of a new standard of corporate liability, the power of regulators to keep corporate abuses in check will remain insufficient.
            A necessary corrective to our current climate of graft and greed, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds will be essential to policymakers and legal minds alike. “[This] timely work offers a dispassionate analysis of problems relating to corporate crime.”—Harvard Law Review

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An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance

Author: Mark Hobart

This provocative volume, the latest in the EIDOS series, debunks the assumption that the application of Western knowledge in the implementation of economic and social development is an unqualified success. The author argues that it is unacceptable to dismiss problems encountered by development projects as the result of an inadequate implementation of knowledge. Rather, it suggests that failures stem from the constitution of knowledge and its object.

By focusing on the ways in which agency in development is attributed to experts, thereby turning previously active participants into passive subjects or ignorant objects, the contributors claim that the hidden agenda to the aims of educating and improving the lives of those in the undeveloped world ultimately perpetuates ignorance.

Table of Contents:

	List of figures
	Notes on contributors
	Preface
	Introduction: the growth of ignorance?	1
1	Segmentary knowledge: a Whalsay sketch	31
2	Processes and limitations of Dogon agricultural knowledge	43
3	Cultivation: knowledge or performance?	61
4	His lordship at the Cobblers' well	79
5	Is death the same everywhere? contexts of knowing and doubting	100
6	Scapegoat and magic charm: law in development theory and practice	116
7	Knowledge and ignorance in the practices of development policy	135
8	The negotiation of knowledge and ignorance in China's development strategy	161
9	Bridging two worlds: an ethnography of bureaucrat-peasant relations in western Mexico	179
10	Potatoes and knowledge	209
	Name index	228
	Subject index	232