Using judicial archives to gain a more comprehensive perspective on corporate mismanagement Lisa Buchter

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Buchter, Lisa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Industrial management.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Contained In:

SAGE research methods cases

Place of Publication:

SAGE Publications Ltd, 2026.

London SAGE Publications Ltd 2025

Summary:

This case offers a discussion of new methodological opportunities to overcome a longstanding challenge in organization and management studies: how to gain a comprehensive picture of organizational misbehavior and corporate crimes, when organizational actors prefer to hide, downplay, or gloss over such aspects of organizational life. The issue of social desirability bias is an enduring question in sociology and organization studies, and it makes it hard to have a full picture of organizational actions, especially for practices that are deemed harmful, and that might hurt organizations' reputation. To explore this question, I show how, in recent research projects on the mismanagement of (sexual) harassment cases in organizational settings, we used judicial cases to obtain a fine-grained picture of organizational responses when these cases of harassment emerged. I first analyze the methodological challenges existing when trying to study corporate misbehavior through traditional qualitative methods: challenges in obtaining interviews for actors involved in wrongdoing; superficial accounts of actors having stakes in downplaying corporate challenges; partial view based on one-sided perspectives (from victims, insider activists, union organizers or whistleblowers). Then, I describe several benefits of triangulating these data with an analysis of judicial decisions: trustworthy account of organizational actions; comprehensive descriptions of the processes of responding to misbehavior; easy access to several standpoints within the organizations; frequent access to long-term, time-stamped unfolding of events; easy comparison across multiple cases in different times and places, etc. Last, I discuss some of the methodological challenges of analyzing judicial decisions

Notes:

Description based on XML content

ISBN:

9781036243050

1036243052

OCLC:

1565876034

Publisher Number:

T300788