Employee Theft: Legal Aspects - Estimates Of Cost, Legal Status Of Employee Theft, Conceptions Of Property, Employee Norms And Employee Theft
systems security horning
Virtually every society, type of economy, enterprise, and occupation has a variant of employee theft. In security-intensive work systems such as banking, pharmaceutical, and electronic microchip plants, employee theft is limited to relatively few items. In security-loose systems, the gray areas of pilferability are more inclusive, covering a wide range of goods and services. There are some work systems such as construction and cargo handling where employee theft is extensive and endemic (Baker and Westin; Ditton; Greenberg; Hollinger and Clark; Horning).
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Each year millions of workers pilfer billions of dollars worth of goods and services from the places where they work. Approximations of the cost, while expected by the business community and security system providers, are not of much value to the social science community because they are only crude guesses. Consider the range of estimates cited in 1999 on the Internet: The American Management Asso…
Employee theft is a violation of the criminal law, a misdemeanor or felony depending upon the value of the goods taken. However, its legal status is clouded by its being an activity that has achieved legitimation, as a "job right," in its lesser forms. Employee theft has an unusually high immunity from prosecution in that most victims seek solutions other than through legal procedure…
Legally, there are only two types of property in the work system: company property owned by the enterprise, and personal property owned by the employees. Conceptually, workers acknowledge the existence of both of these but add a third type—property of uncertain ownership. The latter has no official status but to those in the work system it is very real. Property of uncertain ownership is a …
In time, every work system develops both formal and informal work-group norms that are unique to it. The formal norms comprise the official policies, rules, and procedures; the informal norms emerge as workers seek to adapt the formal norms to their particular work culture and environment. These adaptions often produce subtle, sometimes significant, divergences from the formal norms, and this proc…
It is important to employees that their taking behavior be perceived as something other than theft. Among the cognitive strategies they use are minimalization, neutralization, externalization, compartmentalization, rationalization, super-ordination, and reconceptualization. Historically, efforts to deter employee theft centered on close supervision and controlled access; those are now augmented wi…
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