Scandal and Reform

Lawrence W. Sherman’s Scandal and Reform reframes corruption not as the failing of individual officers but as an organizational condition rooted in culture, structure, and leadership. Drawing on fieldwork in New York, Oakland, Newburgh, and a pseudonymous “Central City,” Sherman shows how corruption flourishes in deviant organizations and how scandals erupt when breaches of public trust trigger collective outrage. He demonstrates that scandals act as both sanction and catalyst: they topple leaders, shift power balances, and create openings for reform, but they can also demoralize institutions and entrench cynicism. Through careful analysis, Sherman traces how departments negotiate the tension between external pressures for integrity and internal imperatives to defend morale and reputation.

The book moves beyond description to a theory of organizational change. Sherman distinguishes between preventive strategies that restrict opportunities for misconduct and punitive strategies that detect and sanction wrongdoers, weighing the limits of each in dispersed and secretive police organizations. Reform chiefs emerge as pivotal figures, infusing their departments with moral values and asserting visibility as a form of normative control. Yet the durability of reform depends not only on leadership but also on building systems for gathering information about misconduct—an ethically fraught task in a democracy that values privacy. By linking scandal, organizational character, and the politics of reform, Scandal and Reform provides a foundational account of how trust in public institutions is violated, contested, and sometimes restored. It remains a critical resource for scholars of organizational deviance, policymakers confronting corruption, and anyone interested in how scandal reshapes the institutions meant to guard democratic life.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.