Regulating White-Collar and Corporate Crimes: An Organisational Perspective

• In Event: The Criminology of Regulation: Special Issue of Regulation & Governance

Abstract

This article presents a conceptual and analytical framework, that of an organisational perspective, for informing the regulation of a range of white-collar and corporate crimes. This perspective encourages us to think about how we can produce and systematise knowledge on (1) how such crimes are organised, (2) why they are organised as they are and who gets involved in them, as primary offenders and as facilitators and money launderers, and (3) about the ‘real’ factors that shape these organisational dynamics over time within particular contexts and under varying conditions. In the context of white-collar crimes, we mean many things by ‘organisation’. We mean the distal and proximal social arrangements and relations that create and shape emergent white-collar crime opportunities and their structures; we mean the mechanisms, relations, processes and conditions that are necessary for the commission, or unfolding, or for the non-commission, of white-collar crimes and how these are contingently connected to particular contexts; we mean the people that collaborate, connect and otherwise associate, whether ephemerally or for longer periods, in the pursuit of criminal goals, and the actual or potential skills, expertise and abilities of these people to accomplish (or resist) particular behaviours that are required of them, as well as the human, social, cultural and material antecedents that enable white-collar crimes to flourish or fade. In this article we probe the following questions: what does a structural analysis alongside a situational analysis imply for regulation and enforcement? How can we re-envisage what these sorts of white-collar and corporate crimes might have looked like in a different regulatory and criminal justice setting? What are the implications of an organisational perspective and an analysis of the white-collar crime commissioning processes for reducing such offending and/or the associated harms?

Authors

• Nicholas Lord, The University of Manchester, UK

• Mike Levi, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University