Successful Resume Fraud

Conjectures on the Origins of Amorality in the Workplace

Bibliographic Data

ID12318823
AuthorsMark N Wexler (0000-0002-2725-4559, Mark N. Wexler is Professor of Applied Ethics, Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, 515 Hastings Street West, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6B 5K3.., corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume12
Issue2
Pages137-152
Publication date2006-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0971-6858 • E-ISSN: 0973-0737
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/097168580601200203
OpenAlexW1985890083
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited23

This article investigates the social accounts employed by 11 highly paid professionals and managers for neutralizing the moral stigma of losing their job due to resume fraud. This ethnographic study, based on 66 hours of interviews, explores the retrospective sense making used by resume fraudsters to justify, personally pardon and excuse behaviour seen as morally problematic by others. In this study the resume fraudsters sampled were selected because they all found high-paying jobs after their public humiliation, and each one morally disengages. They put their transgressions behind them, not by seeing the light of day or asking for forgiveness, but by pointing to the ubiquity of information distortion in their companies, the victimless nature of their so-called transgression, and, most interesting, a portrayal of themselves and their act of resume fraud as the very type of risk taking required to instil capitalism with a passion and a will to succeed. The article closes with a discussion of how moral disengagement enlarges the zone of indifference in populations and reinforces cultures in which the pursuit of amorality thrives

Criminology · Excuse · Moral panic · Passion · Political science · Sociology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Ethics in Business and Education · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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