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Taming Business? Understanding Effectiveness in the Control of Corporate and White-collar Crime

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What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment?

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Abstract

The harms generated by business activity are undeniable and their persistence, despite efforts at their control, striking. Criminologists, amongst others, have documented the range of these harms from financial (Snider 2007), to the deaths and injuries of workers (Tombs and Whyte 2007) and of the public (Hutter 2001), devastation of the environment (Beirne and South 2007), the abuse of market system ideals through insider trading (Polk and Weston 1990, cf. Bhidé 2009) and market manipulation (Punch 1996). The focus of this chapter is to analyse critically the possibilities of control and reduction of these harms by placing them in their economic and political context. It argues that control measures are best understood when framed not only around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which they explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should influence business behaviour and the institutional conditions under which business activity occurs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter uses the terms corporate and white-collar crime and corporate and white-collar harm interchangeably. It is not important to the arguments in this chapter to define what is meant by the term corporate or white-collar crime as neither a restrictive nor an expansive definition assists in understanding the central challenges of control. Further, I have argued elsewhere that categorisations and classifications of the forms of white-collar and corporate crime obscure the ambiguities in these classifications (see e.g. Haines and Beaton-Wells 2012; Haines 2014). What is important in this chapter is an interrogation of the economic and political influences that shape what is, and what is not, considered harmful or unacceptable and by whom and how those influences also shape control.

  2. 2.

    It is intriguing to note that the economist’s term regulatory capture describes this situation, where larger businesses use regulations to squeeze smaller businesses out of the market. This concept of regulatory capture differs markedly from the criminological use of the same term. Here, the emphasis is on weak enforcement, where the regulatory enforcement inspector sees the world too much from the perspective of the particular business and so fails to enforce properly (for a more complete description of the complexities here see Haines 2011, p. 19).

  3. 3.

    Whether they do so, of course, is an entirely different question. The irony here is that larger businesses can find it easier to comply with competition regulations and indeed to use those regulations to demonstrate their compliance with the law (see Parker 2012).

  4. 4.

    I am grateful to my master’s student, Diane Jaio, for bringing this to my attention.

  5. 5.

    My late colleague and friend, Adam Sutton, likened using the law to try and control corporate crime as akin to trying to drown a fish in water.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Fiona Haines

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  1. Fiona Haines
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  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Roger Matthews

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Haines, F. (2016). Taming Business? Understanding Effectiveness in the Control of Corporate and White-collar Crime. In: Matthews, R. (eds) What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57228-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57228-8_9

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