Rule violating corporations, specialists or generalists?

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

Abstract

Detailed knowledge on substantive patterns of regulatory violations based on large and representative samples of corporations would greatly benefit inspection agencies in allocating their limited resources.Taking an innovative life-course perspective on corporate crime, this paper uses rich, longitudinal data on patterns of environmental, occupational health and external safety regulation violations taken from an inspection database of 567 Dutch Seveso 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 rule violation. The present research builds on this budding literature, by examining corporate patterns in the frequency and nature of rule violations. The database used in this research consists of (bi-)annual inspection reports from 2007 until 2022 for all Dutch corporations covered by the Seveso directive. First, this study describes the prevalence of violations of different types of regulations among Dutch Seveso corporations. Second, it examines whether different types of regulatory violations often 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 regulatory transgressions, are then associated with corporate characteristics, to provide the basis for a typology of Dutch Seveso 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 non-compliance. Examining potential clustering of certain types of regulatory 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, NSCR

• Wim Huisman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam