Chapter 13

The substance of this chapter is determined significantly by the relative invisibility of corporate crime from popular and academic view. It begins by examining the emergence of the concept of corporate crime, discussing what this term means, and then reviewing the extent to which corporate crime represents a crime problem. The main body of the chapter considers various dimensions of corporate crime, paying particular attention to issues of visibility, causation and control. The central aim of this chapter is to mark out corporate crime as a legitimate area of criminological concern.

In his famous Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association in 1939, and in various publications through the following decade, Edwin Sutherland introduced the idea of 'white‑collar crime', and in so doing challenged the stereotypical view of the criminal as lower class. But his 'clarion call' to criminologists to focus upon such crimes fell largely upon deaf ears, at least until the end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s: at that point there occurred a re-emergence of interest in corporate crime as one aspect of a more general proliferation of both an academic concern with 'white-collar' crime and a popular and political concern with the socially harmful effects of corporate activity. More recently, however, some commentators, notably Snider (2000), have argued that this concern had diminished dramatically by the end of the twentieth century, as the social credibility of business had increased, with the rise of right-leaning political regimes and commitments to market economics, to the extent that critical scrutiny of corporate activities – not least under the rubric of 'crime' – had become less feasible and/or less desirable. Meanwhile, in the UK, the level of academic attention to corporate crime has never reached that of some historical periods in the US.

Corporate crime is a wide-ranging term, covering a vast range of offences of omission and commission with differing types of modus operandi, perpetrators, effects, and victims. A number of academic studies have focused upon a range of financial crimes, including: illegal share dealings, mergers, and takeovers; various forms of tax evasion; bribery; and other forms of illegal accounting. A second general area of corporate crimes are those committed directly against consumers, including illegal sales/marketing practices; the sale of unfit goods, such as adulterated food; conspiracies to fix prices and/or carve up market share amongst different companies, false/illegal labelling or information; and the fraudulent safety testing of products. Thirdly, we can identify crimes arising out of the employment relationship. These include cases of sexual and racial discrimination and other offences against employment law; violations of wage laws; violations against rights to organise and take industrial action; and a whole range of offences against employee occupational health and safety. Finally, crimes against the environment include illegal emissions to air, water, and land; the failure to provide, or the provision of false, information; hazardous waste dumping; and illegal manufacturing practices.

Corporate crime has enormous economic, physical and social costs. Given its consequences, this raises an obvious question: why is corporate crime almost entirely absent from 'crime, law and order' agendas? To address this question we need to recognise that there are an array of social processes that contribute to removing such offences from dominant definitions of 'crime, law and order' (Slapper and Tombs 1999). These include: formal politics; law and legal regulation; the poverty and paucity of official corporate crime data; the nature and significance of ideologies surrounding business, and the difficulties these pose for naming corporations as potential offenders; representations of crime through various media which converge to produce 'blanket' conceptualisations regarding 'law-and-order' that reinforce dominant stereotypes of crime and the criminal; and the often peculiar victim-offender relationship entailed in many corporate offences. None of the various mechanisms whereby corporate crimes are rendered relatively invisible are particularly remarkable in isolation. What is crucial, however, is their mutually reinforcing nature - that is, they all work in the same direction and to the same effect, removing corporate crime from 'crime law and order' agendas.

One group to whom we might turn in order to bring to light issues which are rendered invisible through political and social processes are academic researchers. Yet one of the most intriguing characteristics of criminology is that it has focused relatively little energy upon bringing to light corporate crimes – historically, and to this day, the vast majority of criminological teaching and research tends simply to assume 'crime' as an activity engaged in by individual men (and sometimes women).

Certainly there are some concepts within dominant criminological theorising that can be used in attempting to explain corporate offending – even if these concepts were not developed with this type of crime in mind. More generally, those forms of criminology that have sought to place an understanding of power at the heart of their theorising have also produced, or have the potential to produce, insights regarding the nature and incidence of corporate offending. Yet to understand corporate crime causation we must take into account a range of factors at four distinct analytical levels: in terms of the individual, at the level of the immediate work-group or sub-unit within the organisation, by reference to the organisation itself, and in terms of the wider economic, political and social environments within which the organisation operates. The urgency of developing such a wide-ranging integrated explanatory framework has been raised by some commentators on corporate crime – yet such theoretical development remains at an early stage.

Understandings of how corporate crime is caused inevitably influence claims regarding how it is to be controlled. And it is in the area of regulation that there is perhaps the most significant body of academic research around corporate crime. The most common finding of studies of regulatory enforcement, across business sectors and discrete areas of legislation, is that a co-operative regulatory approach is dominant. In short, regulators seek to enforce through persuasion – they advise, educate, and bargain, negotiate and reach compromise with the regulated. By contrast there is a body of work that seeks to posit alternatives to co-operative approaches. This advocates a more punitive approach to enforcement – though not suggesting that each and every violation of law by corporations be prosecuted. A key argument of this work is that corporate crime becomes defined as real crime. In any case, it is incorrect to view co-operative and punitive approaches to regulation as alternative strategies: in practice, all forms of regulation reflect a mix of each approach.

Notwithstanding these disputes, a key issue remains – namely that of sanctions that can be imposed once a violation has been taken to court and proven there. By far the most common sanction is the monetary fine. But such are the problems in the use of this sanction that there have been several alternative, imaginative proposals, some of which have been introduced in limited fashion, others of which remain at the proposal stage. A key reason for the failure to extend the use of more adequate sanctions is the lack of political will.

The fact that this chapter repeats a demand made by Sutherland over half a century ago – that corporate crime be given greater attention within the discipline of criminology – indicates the significance of the economic, political and social, obstacles to the task of taking corporate crime seriously. What is at issue here is power – for exposing corporate crime means exposing crimes associated with what are relatively powerful organisations, moreover organisations with which states (local, regional, national) have increasingly intimate relationships. There has, of course, been progress within criminology since Sutherland's 'clarion call' – but corporate crime remains a problematic and contested area of inquiry. Notwithstanding the definitional, conceptual, methodological and theoretical disagreement and problems, it speaks to phenomena which on almost any criterion one chooses – the nature and extent of economic, physical, and social harms – are significant crime and social problems. But in the current era, corporate crime research may be more difficult, even if it is more pressing, not least because of the increasing valorisation of business activity alongside the power of corporations to seek, via their political allies, the decriminalisation of their activities through the introduction of various forms of self-regulation or through simple deregulation, each of which appear to be significant trends in contemporary capitalist nation-states.

Lastly, and taking us back to the discipline of criminology, corporate crime research remains worthwhile simply because it can perform an important role for the discipline. It encourages criminological reflexivity. If the criminological imagination can shed important light upon corporate crime, then there is no doubting that the study of corporate crime is itself one means of reinvigorating that same criminological imagination.

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Chapter 13