The institutionalization of sanctions for wrongdoing inside organizations:Public judgments in Japan, Russia, and the United States

Recent years have seen a rapprochement between research on organizations an d research on la iv. One goal of such research is a better understanding of how the structures of complex organizations and the normative and cognitiv e structures of law interact within different cultures. This article is par t of that enterprise. We report results from surveys conducted in Moscow, T okyo, and Washington in 1993 that asked respondents to judge acts of wrongd oing within corporate hierarchies and then asked them to propose sanctions for the wrongdoers. Most important, respondents' views of sanctioning refle ct cultural differences in conceptions of the individual, the organization, and the rule of law. The discussion locates this research within the large r context of normative-cultural approaches to the study of organizations an d indicates how this research tradition can be enriched by studying the att ribution of responsibility.