The Horror of Corporate Harms
- Publisher:
- LexisNexis Australia
- Publication Type:
- Journal Article
- Citation:
- Australian Journal of Corporate Law, 2022, 38, pp. 23-45
- Issue Date:
- 2022-12-18
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This article argues that the nature of corporate harms — both the harms in and of themselves and the criminal law’s (lack of) response — can be (re)conceptualised by drawing upon both the emotion and genre of horror. Recent emotion studies argue that horror is a response to harm so extreme or abnormal that it cannot be easily assimilated into one’s understanding of the world. This article explores the ways in which corporate harms are currently schema incongruent, on an individual and social level, but particularly for the purposes of analysis, for criminal legal doctrine. This article analyses the ways in which harms are used in the horror genre to arouse horror and explore the commonalities between the harms on display in the horror genre with corporate and organisational harms. The significance of this analysis is that it shows both the way corporate harms are horrific in and of themselves and that the relative absence of a criminal legal response is horrific. This then leaves us with the question: do we want corporate harms to continue to be part of the horror genre — whereby harms are understood and conceptualised as schema incongruent — or can and should the schema of criminal law be reshaped to better conceptualise and respond to corporate harms?
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