Consider the typical example of corporate malpractice: insider trading. Say a particular trader has been caught red-handed trading on inside information. Who is to blame for this? If management didn’t know, it’s the trader. But maybe the trader’s peers were in on it, in which case the group manager might be the one responsible. Or perhaps the practice is institutional, in which case it’s the CEO who would take the blame.1
The preceding scenario is an example of a responsibility chain: you have several different elements of a system who can all process ...
