Research Paper on:
Corporate Greed and its Psychosocial Effects

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
to accounting practices. The list of accounting abuses by companies such as Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco and more recently, Worldcom will keep university professors and their students active for years  to come answering the question - how could the executive managers of these companies become so full of themselves that they actually believed they could get away with such factors?  While much of the information will provide good fodder for business studies, these companies and their managers actions also provide interesting scenarios  for psychological and sociological case studies. One could say that it was shady accounting practices that brought down Enron and Worldcom. Digging deeper, however, one could also say that it  was psychological and sociological forces that created these problems in the first place. Humans, after all, ran the companies - and humans are prone to all kinds of incitements, including  corporate greed. In this paper, well examine a psychological theory and a sociological theory and use those theories to explain what occurred  with the Enron bankruptcy. As a reminder, Enron, an energy company, collapsed because of huge amounts of hidden debt and dishonest accounting procedures. In collapsing, the company wiped out the  life savings and retirement plans of countless employees who had worked hard to save their funds - but because of corporate greed, lost those funds.  The sociologist Robert Merton expanded on the concept of anomie, which helped make him one of the more well-known criminal sociologists of his time (Evans, 2002). His  theories, however, also fit well with corporate directors that were with Enron and Worldcom, too. Mertons theories began with two elements of social structure - one of which was culturally