In 1988, Donald Cressey published a previously overlooked article. According to Cressey, there was a lack in the agenda of corporate crime research concerning theory and…
Abstract
Purpose
In 1988, Donald Cressey published a previously overlooked article. According to Cressey, there was a lack in the agenda of corporate crime research concerning theory and conceptual precision of what exactly the scientific object was and how it could reinforce our understanding of white-collar criminality. Cressey stated the idea that a fictitious person, like a corporation, upon which were bestowed properties such as a will of its own (intentions and motivations) and a consciousness to act morally and ethically have a responsibility to follow the order of law, leads to a fundamental theoretical problem in terms of discovering the causes of crimes committed by such a fictitious person. I follow this line of thought about the arguments made by representatives of corporate crime. Specifically, I follow the concept of “decoupling”, by using various techniques of formal logic. The conclusion is that the concept of corporate crime is a logical contradiction (an eternal false statement), but the research has one analytical point which must be incorporated into the research of white-collar criminality: how structural conditions of a corporation’s policy and strategy “produce” or influence the individuals within the corporation to make decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a research paper based on the technic of formal logic. The design of this research is sentence and modal logic.
Findings
The concept of corporate crime is logically a contradiction. Thereby it has no value in the research agenda of white-collar criminality.
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, no one has done a formal logical analysis based on modal logic to investigate the consistence of the concept corporate crime.
Details
Keywords
In 1988, Donald Cressey published a previously overlooked article. According to Cressey, there was a lack in the agenda of corporate crime research concerning theory and…
Abstract
Purpose
In 1988, Donald Cressey published a previously overlooked article. According to Cressey, there was a lack in the agenda of corporate crime research concerning theory and conceptual precision of what exactly the scientific object was and how it could reinforce the understanding of white-collar criminality. Cressey stated the idea that a fictitious person, such as a corporation, upon which were bestowed properties such as a will of its own (intentions and motivations) and a consciousness to act morally and ethically have a responsibility to follow the order of law, leds to a fundamental theoretical problem in terms of discovering the causes of crimes committed by such a fictitious person. I follow this line of thought about the arguments made by representatives of corporate crime. Specifically, I follow the concept of “decoupling,” by using various techniques of formal logic. The conclusion is that the concept of corporate crime is a logical contradiction (an eternal false statement), but the research has one analytical point which must be incorporated into the research of white-collar criminality: how structural conditions of a corporation’s policy and strategy “produce” or influence the individuals within the corporation to make decisions. The aim of the paper is to prove on logical grounds that the direction of research on corporate crime is on the wrong track to find the truth (basic elements and mechanisms) about white-collar crime.
Design/methodology/approach
Using formal logic, specifically modal logic.
Findings
The concept “corporate crime” is a logical contradiction.
Research limitations/implications
Concerning the conclusion, the implications has to be that corporate crime is a misleading concept in the research agenda of white-collar crime.
Practical implications
The authors have to reconsider the whole research field of corporate crime research.
Originality/value
To best of my knowledge, no one has before done a critic of corporate crime concept by formal logic.
Details
Keywords
In the field of crime prevention there are several theoretical approaches explaining why crime occurs and how to prevent it. Three of them – routine activity theory, crime pattern…
Abstract
Purpose
In the field of crime prevention there are several theoretical approaches explaining why crime occurs and how to prevent it. Three of them – routine activity theory, crime pattern theory and the theory of crime-as-choice – are logically tested in this work. The point of departure is to test if the theories are logical consistent and logical valid, irrespective of whether the criterion for criminal intent is changed from direct intention to negligence.
Design/methodology/approach
The issues will be explored in a logical structure by a first-order logic propositional analysis.
Findings
The analysis shows that all three theories are logical consistent, but only routine activity theory is logical valid. The conclusion is that crime prevention should in general assume that routine activity theory is the legitimate theory and that social prevention as a prevention strategy is logically unnecessary to adopt because it does not matter whether the offender is motivated (direct intention) or not (negligence).
Practical implications
It does not really matter if the authors theoretically treat white-collar offenders as motivated, because if they have committed an actus reus, they are an offender according to the objective requisites. This means that the best strategies to prevent a potential white-collar criminal are situational prevention, i.e. complicate their access to money, where it becomes irrelevant if the potential offender has a mens rea or not. What counts is the prevention of actus reus by a potential offender.
Originality/value
As far as I know, no one has previously investigated the logical consistency and/or logical validity of routine activity theory, crime pattern theory and the theory of crime-as-choice as theories of crime prevention.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top‐ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top‐ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for companies that get a decision by a regulatory agency and which kind of properties there are when the regulatory agency goes to a decision.
Design/methodology/approach
Data on decisions taken against violation (criminal, civil, or administrative) collected from annual reports (1999‐2008) presented on the internet by eight regulatory agencies in Sweden. The corporations collected by the internet site “largest companies” and the Swedish business magazine Affärsvärlden (World of Business). The analysis of data were worked out by cross tab, designed as analysis of covariation between one independent variable to one dependent variable, or two or more independent variables (were one or more of them were held invariant to each other) to one dependent variable.
Findings
Approximately, 60 companies (85.7 per cent) had at least one decision against them during the period 1999‐2008, and 28 companies had more than five decisions (court, administrative law, objection or settlement) against them, which means that 40 per cent of the whole sample performed a carrier criminality. Among the variables, low profitability, interior business, and to some degree, management control tend to covary with some or all kinds of decisions given by the regulatory agencies.
Originality/value
The paper provides the field of white‐collar crime an investigation of corporations as offenders from the Swedish horizon. It provides regulatory agencies with a model of the causality behind the decisions against a corporation.