Organizational complexity can displace criminal responsibility away from individual actors.

Evidence

Adjudication of criminal charges has produced a new form of displaced responsibility—banks are too bureaucratically complex to convict. In this form of exoneration, a bank’s complexity is at fault, not the bankers. There were warning signs within J.P. Morgan that Madoff was running a fraudulent scheme (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014b). One employee noted that Madoff’s returns were “possibly too good to be true.” He cautioned against a deal because there were “too many red flags” (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014b). A bank risk manager explained that a bank executive told him that “there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme” (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014b). The multiple explicit warnings prompted a request for a meeting with Madoff, who refused (King, 2007). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1574

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the notion of bureaucratic complexity as a mechanisms of displaced responsibility.
• XREF: Connects to Bandura’s broader moral disengagement framework and to organizational-blaming dynamics studied in ‘A Midwife’s Tale’ or corporate crime literature generally. — connects to: Resisting organizational evil individually is too rare to be the main preventive lever — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 4036; Institutional cover-up delays justice until perpetrators are beyond legal reach — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1755