Rule Violating Corporations, Specialists or Generalists?

• In Event: Trajectories and Patterns of White-Collar and Corporate Offending

Abstract

Taking an innovative life-course perspective on corporate crime, this paper uses longitudinal data on patterns of regulatory violations taken from an inspection database of 567 Dutch chemical corporations. While life-course criminology is one of the discipline’s main explanatory frameworks, it has only recently been applied in corporate crime research to study longitudinal trajectories of corporate offending. The present research examines corporate patterns in the frequency and nature of offending. First, this study describes the prevalence of violations of different types of regulations among Dutch corporations. Second, it examines whether different types of violations occur together in the same corporation, and whether distinct patterns in the nature of regulatory violations can be discerned using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). Latent classes of violations, are then associated with corporate characteristics, to provide the basis for a typology of Dutch corporations, which is contrasted to categorizations available from the extant – qualitative – literature. The current study contributes to ongoing discussions on regulatory strategies to best combat corporate offending. Examining potential clustering of certain types of violations speaks on the underlying drivers of non-compliance and allows enforcement agencies to focus on certain topics within the inspections, enhancing the effectiveness of their enforcement activities.

Authors

• Marieke Kluin, Leiden University

• Arjan Blokland, Leiden University / NSCR

• Wim Huisman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam