The Organization of Corporate Crime: Introduction to Special Issue of Administrative Sciences

Corporate crimes seem endemic to modern society. Newspapers are filled on a daily basis with examples of financial manipulation, accounting fraud, food fraud, cartels, bribery, toxic spills and environmental harms, corporate human rights violations, insider trading, privacy violations, discrimination, corporate manslaughter or violence, and, recently, software manipulation. Clearly, the problem of corporate crime transcends the micro level of the individual ‘rotten apple’ (Ashforth et al. 2008; Monahan and Quinn 2006); although corporate crimes are ultimately committed by individual members of an organization, they have more structural roots, as the enabling and justifying organizational context in which they take place plays a defining role. Accounts of corporate fraud, misrepresentation, or deception that foreground individual offender’s motivations and characteristics, often fail to acknowledge that organizational decisions are more than the aggregation of individual choices and actions, and that organizations are more than simply the environment in which individual action takes place (Huising and Silbey 2018). “Corporate crime is organizational crime, and its explanation calls for an organizational level of analysis” (Kramer 1982, p. 79). Organization studies have therefore become increasingly preoccupied with explaining organizational dysfunctional and antisocial behavior, misconduct, and deviancy (Greve et al. 2010), known as “the dark side of organization” (Linstead et al. 2014), and also has an important contribution to make to our understanding of corporate crime and its prevention. On the other hand, administrative and organization sciences studying the administration, management, leadership, cultures, and governance institutions of organizations, as well as their interactions with the behavior within these organizations, should address corporate crimes as an object of study, as failures and rogue processes can inform organization theory. The multiple aspects and causes of corporate crime call for a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach and a variety of perspectives. Corporate crime has been predominantly studied in criminology, economics, and law. In addition, insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, business ethics and political science, high reliability and safety science, and information and technological sciences are highly relevant. Many of these have links with organization science. In criminology, Edwin Sutherland (1949) is usually named the “founding father” of corporate and white-collar crime scholarship, introducing the notion that crime happens not just in the streets, but also “in the suites”, in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association in 1939; although corporate crime scholarship dates back much further and has European roots (Hebberecht 2015; Huisman et al. 2015). Criminology, “the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon [including] . processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting towards the breaking of laws” (Sutherland and Cressey 1960, p. 3), studies white-collar crime, “crimes of the powerful”, elite crime, and corporate and organizational crimes. Within this spectrum, we define corporate or organizational crimes as illegal or harmful acts, committed by legitimate organizations or their members, primarily for the benefit of these organizations (Van Erp and Huisman 2017). This broad conceptualization parallels Greve et al.’s (Greve et al. 2010, p. 56) definition of organizational