Understanding Insurance Customer Dishonesty: Outline of aMoral-Sociological Approach

Most consumer morality studies focus on consumer immorality, i.e. different types and degrees of consumer dishonesty or deviance. This paper follows this tradition, by looking at insurance customer dishonesty. For looking at insurance customer dishonesty in a wider perspective, the paper drafts a sociology of insurance customer morality, including outlines of micro-level, meso-level and macro-level moral sociologies of insurance fraud, as well as a discussion of moral heterogeneity and a critical understanding of deviance. As a next step a few empirical rsearch questions are formulated and illustrated with data from a Norwegian-German pilot study. Johannes Brinkmann has a Ph.D. in sociology and is a professor of business ethics at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo. Most of his recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Teaching Business Ethics and Business Ethics A European Review. He has also published a number of books, two of them related to business ethics (in Norwegian, 1993 and 2001). Patrick Lentz is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Marketing, Dortmund University. Paper presented at the 11th Annual International Business Ethics Conference in Chicago, October 21–23, 2004