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LIT-1431: The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis

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StatusUnavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner's request, not read: the article is closed (OpenAlex: no open-access copy, no repository full text), and no author copy was found. Filed to keep apart two theses that share a name: that psychopaths in corporations cause harm (this paper) and that the corporation itself is psychopathic (Bakan, LIT on The Corporation). Its abstract is enough for that; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied.
Tagssociety-and-governance, psychopathology-and-treatment, ethics

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Clive R. Boddy (2011), Journal of Business Ethics 102(2):255–259 — DOI-10.1007/s10551-011-0810-4

Key takeaways

Registered, not read. The abstract calls it “a very short theoretical paper” which “presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis.” It ends: “Further research into this theory is called for.”

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, with Bakan’s The Corporation, to separate two theses the phrase “corporate psychopath” covers. Boddy’s is about individuals: people with psychopathic traits who rise in corporations. Bakan’s is about the corporation as such. The record’s question on corporate psychopathy concerns the second. The first is a rival explanation of the same harms, and the record’s claim on the question has to say why harm can come from a corporation with no such individual in it, which a documented case can test.

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