An analysis of 119 corporation conduct codes suggests that top executives of American corporations only weakly shared the concern for social responsibility so often voiced by business leaders in the mid-1970s, when most of the codes were written. The documents give more attention to unethical conduct likely to decrease a firm's profits than to similar conduct that might increase profits. Familiarity with changing societal values is evident, but the executives that authored the codes tended to consider themselves, not the society or even apart of it, to be the conscience of the corporation. The codes have neither relieved organizational pressures to be unethical nor convinced opinion leaders that corporations have become more socially responsible in recent years.

After a brief review of determinate sentencing systems, this study examines the impact of Minnesota's determinate sentencing law on various presentence and sentencing outcomes. Using comparable pre-and postguideline measures, the results of this study suggest that Minnesota's reform effort was largely successful in reducing disparity within the scope of the new guidelines. However, although the direct impact of socioeconomic attributes of the offender diminished, these characteristics continued to influence sentencing decisions indirectly through various presentence decisions and case attributes not governed by the guidelines Different models of charge bargaining and sentence negotiations are also observed when pre-and postguideline models are compared. Yet, the determinants of these time-specific models are not consistent with the assumptions of a circumvention argument. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research evaluating the impact of determinate sentencing systems on achieving social neutrality in the application of criminal sanctions.Few issues in the processing of criminal defendants have generated more controversy than the ongoing debate over the merits of various sentencing philosophies and policies. Yet, over the past two decades there has been a notable shift toward the development of explicit standards and guidelines specifying the type and amount of punishment to be imposed on convicted offenders. Although those determinate sentencing systems proposed and enacted in numerous states have taken various forms and reflect competing philosophies about the purpose of punishment, this move toward The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Kay A. Knapp for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript and for providing the data for this study from the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission. This project was supported in part by the

This study examines the irnpact of model selection on substantive conclusions about racial differences in presentence and sentencing practices. Using a statewide sarnple of convicted felons. an additive model is estimated to assess the direct and indirect effects of race on various dispositional decisions. Then. separate models for blacks and whites are estimated to evaluate within-and between-race differences. A cornparison of the results from each specification illustrates how the standard additive approach used in past studies can mask and suppress racial differences in criminal processing.The findings of race-specific models are then discussed in terms of their implications for further research on racial disparity in the application of criminal sanctions.