Corporate Culture and Organizational Misconduct: mapping and assessing existing empirical approaches

• In Event: EUROC 8: Novel data and approaches of corporate crime

Abstract

Organizational criminology has yielded a substantive body of empirical work that can help understand organizational characteristics as drivers of deviance and crime. In particular, organizational culture is increasingly seen as a key driver of organizational deviance and crime, for example through criminogenic traits and normalisation of deviancy. However, at present such criminological work has not developed a systematic understanding of what aspects of organizational culture drive organizational misbehavior. The present study will draw on insights across the criminological, social and behavioral sciences to develop an integrated view of existing knowledge of how organizational culture shapes organizational deviance and corporate crime. It first provides a concise review of existing quantitative measures that assess organizational cultural aspects that are deemed to be linked to negative organizational conduct. It seeks to provide an overview of what the main approaches are, to what extend these approaches study organizational culture, and assesses what types of cultural measures are conceptually and empirically linked to what types of negative organizational conduct. Based on this, the paper will show what the current gaps are in existing measurements and showcase a new methodological approach, using the within-case study method of process tracing to better understand the cultural mechanisms at play in organizational deviance and misconduct.

Authors

• Nina Tobsch, University of Amsterdam

• Benjamin van Rooij, University of Amsterdam

• Marieke Kluin, Leiden University