Corporate Compliance

Compliance has long been identified by scholars of white-collar crime as a key strategic control device in the regulation of corporations and complex organisations. Compliance has long been identified by scholars of white-collar crime as a key strategic control device in the regulation of corporations and complex organisations. Nevertheless, this essential process has been largely ignored within criminology as a specific subject for close scrutiny – Corporate Compliance: Crime, Convenience and Control seeks to address this anomaly. This initiating book applies the theory of convenience to provide criminological insight into the enduring self-regulatory phenomenon of corporate compliance. Convenience theory suggests that compliance is challenged when the corporation has a strong financial motive for illegitimate profits, ample organisational opportunities to commit and conceal wrongdoing, and executive willingness for deviant behaviour. Focusing on white-collar deviance and crime within corporations, the book argues that lack of compliance is recurrently a matter of deviant behaviour by senior executives withinorganisations who abuse their privileged positions to commission, commit and conceal financial crime. Petter Gottschalk is Professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational behaviour at BI Norwegian Business School, Norway. Christopher Hamerton is Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice Research in the School of Economic, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Compliance has long been identified by scholars of white-collar crime as a key strategic control device in the regulation of corporations and complex organisations. Nevertheless, this essential process has been largely ignored within criminology as a specific subject for close scrutiny – Corporate Compliance: Crime, Convenience and Control seeks to address this anomaly. This initiating book applies the theory of convenience to provide criminological insight into the enduring self-regulatory phenomenon of corporate compliance. Convenience theory suggests that compliance is challenged when the corporation has a strong financial motive for illegitimate profits, ample organisational opportunities to commit and conceal wrongdoing, and executive willingness for deviant behaviour. Focusing on white-collar deviance and crime within corporations, the book argues that lack of compliance is recurrently a matter of deviant behaviour by senior executives within organisations who abuse their privileged positions to commission, commit and conceal financial crime.