Corporate Deviance: Corporations vs Public Interest

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In the early 1980s, General Motors built a new Cadillac plant, which proved to be detrimental to Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood (Cura, 77). While General Motors’s intention was to advance their corporate interest , they destroyed the Poletown community as there was displacement and greater vandalism (Cura, 77). In addition, “Power, Social Networks, and Organizational Deviance” by John Cura finds that many institutions sided with General Motors as opposed to the citizens of Poletown (Cura, 75-76). In addition, “The Great Basketball Swindle” by Larry Penner, “Is utilization a public purpose pretext?” by Jeffrey Kleeger, “Eminent Domain Fight Has a Canadian Twist” by Leslie Kaufman and Dan Frosch, and Casino Tries to Squash Property Owner” by Dana Berliner examine how private interests have greater power than public interests. These are the sources that examine corporate deviance.
Before General Motors set foot in Poletown, a neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, it was a working class neighborhood composed of Eastern Europeans (Cura, 72). According to “Power, Social Networks, and Organizational Deviance” by John Cura, “Coleman Young, the Mayor of Detroit, and Thomas Murphy, the chair of General Motors (GM), announced that a new Cadillac plant (the Hamtramck plant) would soon be built in Detroit on a site that would include a large portion of Poletown. The plant was packaged as a renovation project for Detroit that would create jobs (GM claimed that 6,000 workers would eventually be employed at the plant) and bring new promises to a city hit hard by economic recession and corporate flight (Cura, 72).” Citizens of Poletown were upset by these plans, as it would necessitate the taking of 465 acres of land in Poletown, on which their ho...

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...viance is examined.

Works Cited
Berliner, Dana. "Casino Tries to Squash Property Owner." Academic OneFile (2000): n. pag. Academic OneFile. June 2000. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Cura, John. "Power, Social Networks, and Organizational Deviance." The Relativity of Deviance. Third ed. Los Angeles: Sage, n.d. 72-113. Print.
Kaufman, Leslie, and Dan Frosch. "Eminent Domain Fight Has a Canadian Twist." New York Times 17 Oct. 2011: n. pag. Print.
Kleeger, Jeffrey. "Is Utilization a Public Purpose Pretext." Academic OneFile (2012): n. pag. Print.
Penner, Larry. "The Great Basketball Swindle." Gale Group (n.d.): n. pag. Academic OneFile. Web. 18 Nov. 2013. .

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