Exploring the Dimensions of a Corporate Criminal Career Paradigm

• In Event: From Boardrooms to the Bench: Theories of Elite Criminality, Neutralizations, and Offenders

Abstract

The criminal career paradigm emerged as a way to organize knowledge about the dimensions and characteristics of individual offending and how it configures over the life-course (Piquero, Farrington, Blumstein, 2003). Recent attempts to apply the paradigm to corporations has been limited by available data (Kluin, Schell-Busey, Simpson, and Pierce, 2025). In this paper, we leverage previously collected longitudinal panel data (Simpson, Shaprio, Beckman, and Martin, 2020) to identify corporate criminal career dimensions. The data cover multiple years (1996-2013) of firm misconduct by the largest US based companies, yielding 24,305 distinct firm years for analysis. Illegality is measured by regulatory, civil, and criminal enforcement actions, capturing anti-competitive, environmental, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (frauds/bribery) violations and case outcomes. The data also have detailed information about corporate board characteristics and how they change over time. Adopting a corporate criminal career lens both advances theory and has important practical considerations in that findings can inform internal (governance) and external (legal) prevention and control mechanisms.

Authors

• Sally Simpson, University of Maryland, College Park

• Marieke H.A. Kluin, Leiden University

• Jordan Pierce, University of Maryland, College Park

• Natalie Schell-Busey, Rowan University