).
Mail order fraud is difficult to accurately define. In most instances, product quality, features, and capacities are simply greater than those inferred by the advertising (Wiener, 1989). Companies which engage in such deceptive practices are usually unwilling or quite reluctant to provide a refund.
In other instances, the products offered through mail order are simply over priced to an incredible degree. An out standing example of this practice is the life insurance offered without need of a physical examination by several companies ("Insurance You Can Live Without," 1988).
Most mail order firms are legitimate, and they stand behind their products (Englander, 1989). If a product offered through mail order appears to be too good to be true, however, it probably is just that (McKeown, 1988).
There are three underlying causes for the increase in mail order fraud. These causes are a misuse of power on the part of retailers, a deterioration in values which causes a misuse of power to seem acceptable to some people, and the invasion of the computer which made mail order growth possible, and brought along with it the potential for abuse.
Power is a concept with which organizational behaviorists have long been concerned (McDermott, 1985). The use of power within organizations is most often perceived as a practice employed by one individual to overcome the resistance of another, as a means of attaining an organizational goal. In the context of this perception, power differences are thought to create problems within organizations, because such power differences lead to the development of organizational con flicts. The inappropriate application of power has been linked to managerial turnover.
Conflicts are typically thought to be essential, as a means of providing a setting where power many be employed.This assumption is, to a degree, paradoxical, in that power
differences are also thought to be one cause...