Ethnography Financial Crimes Enforcement in the Age of Crisis: Methodological Considerations

• In Event: Challenges & Innovations in Qualitative Criminological Research

Abstract

In this paper I will elaborate on the methodological challenges of doing ethnographic research at agencies tasked to enforce financial regulation and pursue financial crimes.
With mischief on the financial markets rarely prosecuted and with most civil actions ending with settlements, what passes on as enforcement happens in the shadow of the law. Legal scholars and criminologists looking solely at lawsuits, indictments and judgements to demarcate what is a legitimate and illegitimate on the financial markets could only grasp the fraction of regulatory and enforcement activities.
What follows from this is that if we want to understand regulation and enforcement as whole, we need to view it as organizational activity, performed by and through organizations constantly confronted with the need of measuring and communicating its mastering of the problems they were set up to control.
The paper is based on the experiences of a 3 year-long fieldwork that took place in the immediate post-crisis years among regulators, prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the United States and Germany.

Author

• Csaba Györy, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law