Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control

From Foreword: "Why do corporations obey the law? When companies violate the law, what kinds of interventions are most apt to correct their behavior and return them to compliant status? In this book Sally Simpson examines whether the shift toward the use of criminal law, with its emphasis on punishment and stigmatization, is an effective strategy for controlling illegal corporate behavior. Simpson assess the strengths and weaknesses of the criminalization of corporate misconduct and compares it with other approaches, such as civil and administrative legal interventions and cooperative crime control methods. She evaluates several theoretical assumptions about why criminalization should work and explain why it often does not. In reality, organizational actors pose challenges to deterrence; in light of the empirical record, the rational-actor assumptions underlying much crime control theory fall short of explaining illegal corporate behavior across the board. Simpson concludes that strict criminalization models that rely on punishments will not yield sufficiently high levels of compliance. Empirical data suggest that in most cases cooperative models work best with most corporate offenders. Because some corporate managers, however, respond primarily ton instrumental concerns, Simpson argues that compliance should also be buttressed by punitive strategies. Simpson's review and application of the relevant empirical literature on corporate crime and compliance, combined with her judicious examination of theory and approaches, make a valuable new contribution to the literature on white-collar crime and deterrence and criminal behavior more generally."