Corporate concealment of tobacco hazards: Changing motives and historical contexts

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Explanations of corporate wrongdoing tend to fall into two competing camps. Researchers of corporate behavior, on the one hand, emphasize that bounded rationality is inherent in all responses of organizations to their constantly changing environments. Criminologists, on the other hand, emphasize that corporations must rationally seek to meet their profit goals. We try to draw the best insights from both camps to explain one type of action: concealment by corporations of the known hazards of their products. Patterned historical differences are central to our analysis. Whereas motivations to continue developing and selling a product escalates rapidly over time, we argue, reasons to abandon it accumulate slowly. By the time this uneven race is complete, managers, organizations, and communities have strong motives and ability to suppress knowledge. They have “too much invested to quit.” We apply our explanation to three centuries of tobacco production, in order to explain the more recent history of blatant hazard concealment.

This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit: