Social Research articles from December 2008

Social Research archives from December 2008

Endangered scholars worldwide.
December 22, 2008... IRAN FARZAD KAMANGER, an Iranian teacher, has been brutally and repeatedly tortured since his arrest in 2006 and is now facing the imminent possibility of execution. He was sentenced to death by the Iranian Revolutionary Court on February...

Editor's introduction.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... THE DECISION TO EDIT AN ISSUE ON FRAUD UNFORTUNATELY REFLECTS the sense of the times we are living through in this country. Although it seems highly likely that fraud has always been an aspect of social life, it now seems to have virtually...

Disgrace: the lies of the patriarch.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2008... THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC COMPLEX OF THE HEBREW BIBLE, WHICH OPENS with Genesis and the creation of the world and closes at the end of Kings with the Babylonian exile, (1) tells a sad story--notwithstanding the faint light that flickers at the end, a...

State-of-the-art impersonations for comedy and everyday.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... RECENTLY SOCK PUPPETRY HAS BEEN IN THE NEWS. IT IS CURIOUS HOW the latest means of faking identity can take on the names of age-old--in this instance also childish--games and performances. That nomenclature helps us understand what is going on,...

When false representations ring true (and when they don't).(Essay)
December 22, 2008... IN APRIL 2007, MARILEE JONES RESIGNED AS MIT'S DEAN OF ADMISSIONS after word reached the administration that she had fabricated part of her resume 28 years earlier (Lewin, 2007: A1). When she first applied for a job at MIT in 1979, Jones had...

Election fraud and the myths of American democracy.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND THE BITTER 36-DAY FIGHT that followed over the pivotal state of Florida, opened the eyes of many Americans to a reality they had, up to that point, largely chosen to ignore: that their electoral system...

Fraud in science.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... IT WAS A POPULAR MYTH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH century that scientists like Einstein, perhaps befuddled by the complicated mathematics they rely on, had abandoned common sense. It was, after all, the steam engine that created the...

Fraud in the U.S. health-care system: exposing the vulnerabilities of automated payments systems.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... IN 1993, ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO DECLARED HEALTH-CARE fraud the "number two crime problem in America" after violent crime--a remarkable status for a category of white-collar crime. In 1995, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh testified that...

Moral, social, and economic dimensions of insurance claims fraud.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... CONSUMER DISHONESTY STEMS FROM A COMPLEX INTERPLAY OF motivations and circumstances, moderated by morality, opportunity, social norms, and institutional context. The complexity is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the case of insurance...

What went wrong? Accounting fraud and lessons from the recent scandals.(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In the public eye, Enron's mission was nothing more than the cover story for a massive fraud. --Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind CORPORATE FRAUD, BANKRUPTCIES, AND VARIOUS ILLEGAL ACTS HAVE always been part of the business...

What do we know about tax fraud? An overview of recent developments.
December 22, 2008... QUESTIONS ABOUT TAX FRAUD HAVE BEEN AROUND AS LONG AS TAXES themselves and will remain an area of discovery as long as taxes exist. To understand the impact of a tax system, it is important to know who complies with the tax law as well as who...