“A highly readable and timely book, tackling challenging questions from an engaged perspective.”—American Journal of Sociology

"An engagingly written, fascinating, fast-paced report on corporate governance problems of the past ten years. Highly recommended."
—Choice

"Pump and Dump is a great achievement. It is well written and lucid and will be read widely and assigned in classes. It will appeal to white-collar crime scholars, social scientists more generally, and to a general readership."
—Kitty Calavita, professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine

Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing-the mere mention of these companies brings forth images of scandal, fraud, and large-scale corruption. But do these dark stars of media stories represent a few "bad apples" or does their misconduct provide evidence of a regulatory black hole in the so-called New Economy?

In Pump and Dump, Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard argue that these scandals are symptoms of a corporate governance problem that began in the 1990s as New Economy pundits claimed that advances in technology and forms of business organization were changing the rules. A decade later, it looked more like a case of no rules as endless revelations of fraud in the wake of corporate bankruptcies left ordinary investors bewildered and employees out of work with little or nothing.

At a time when there is growing debate about proposals to privatize programs like Social Security and to promote an "ownership society," this book offers a path-breaking analysis of America's most urgent economic problem: a system that relies on self-regulation and the rancid politics that continue to support the short-term interests of financial elites over the long-term interests of most Americans.

Robert H. Tillman is a professor of sociology and Michael L. Indergaard is an associate professor of sociology at St. John's University in New York