The Institutionalization of Sanctions for Wrongdoing inside Organizations: Public Judgments in Japan, Russia, and the United States

Recent years have seen a rapprochement between research on organizations and research on law. One goal of such research is a better understanding of how the structures of complex organizations and the normative and cognitive structures of law interact within different cultures. This article is part of that enterprise. We report results from surveys conducted in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington in 1993 that asked respondents to judge acts of wrongdoing within corporate hierarchies and then asked them to propose sanctions for the wrongdoers. Most important, respondents' views of sanctioning reflect cultural differences in conceptions of the individual, the organization, and the rule of law. The discussion locates this research within the larger context of normativecultural approaches to the study of organizations and indicates how this research tradition can be enriched by studying the attribution of responsibility. In a recent essay on the legal environments of organizations, Edelman and Suchman (1997) note that the last few years have witnessed a rapprochement between research on organizations and research on law. This is a welcome development from which both areas benefit. Organizational theories are less likely to omit law from their analysis (Coleman 1990; Fisse & Braithwaite 1993). In turn, legal analyses less frequently make untested and often naive assumptions about how organizations respond to legal rules (Coffee 1981; Williamson 1985; Arlen 1994; Metzger & Dalton 1996; Suchman & Edelman 1996). One of the goals of the new rapprochement between organizational and legal research is a better understanding of how the structures of complex organizations and the normative and cognitive structures of law interact within different cultures. This report is part of that enterprise. Our research on how people attribute responsibility and assign sanctions for corporate wrongdoing offers an opportunity to better understand how a practice or pattern of behavior is institutionalized inside organizational forms and also offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the relationship between organizations and the cultures within which they reside. The data reported here are based on responses to three surveys conducted in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, DC, that present people with short experimental vignettes describing wrongdoing inside organizations and then ask them to attribute responsibility and assess sanctions. Before we turn to the research findings, however, we must place them in context. The first section sets forth some basic tenets of a normative cultural approach to the study of organizations and locates research on law within that tradition. Section II outlines parallels between the attributional approach to the study of responsibility judgments and this tradition of organizational research. Section III presents some of our research findings, focusing on the sanctions people propose for wrongdoing in corporate hierarchies. The concluding section reviews these findings and discusses ways in which attributional research and the normative cultural approach to organizations can be combined to improve our understanding of both law and corporate structures. I. Normative Cultural Approach to the Study of Organizations Edelman and Suchman (1997) delineate two broad approaches to the study of law and organizations: a rational materialist approach and a normative cultural alternative. The former perceives organizations as relatively rational wealth maximizers and the law as a system of incentives and sanctions designed to steer corporate behavior in desired directions.l The latter, as its name suggests, adopts a less instrumental perspective. It is particularly skeptical of rational actor models, it emphasizes the relationship between organizations and their environment, and it attends to the importance of culture in shaping organizations. Both perspectives are useful windows into the ways in which law and organizations interact. …