When Business Breaks the Rules: The Value of a Criminology‐Informed “Organizational” Perspective for the Regulation of White‐Collar and Corporate Crimes

ABSTRACT This article argues that if the aspiration is to enhance regulatory and governance responses to white‐collar and corporate crimes, consideration of the organization of these offending behaviors must be central to the scholarly, practice, and policy discussion. Regulation and governance scholarship has thrived as a field of study in its contributions to the theories and practices of regulation (and regulators) but has backgrounded the dynamics of how regulatees organize their rule‐breaking behaviors, and the implications of this for intentional interventions. Criminology has advanced our understanding of the procedural aspects of crimes but has largely marginalized business and organizational offending, with proportionately few criminologists displaying interest in how better to regulate organizations that violate the rules. To help bridge these gaps, in this article we draw on an “organizational perspective” to argue that “good enough” regulatory approaches should be directly informed by an understanding of how and why such crimes or offending behaviors are organized in the ways they are, and of the factors that shape these dynamics over time within particular contexts. We argue for the development of a program of research that synthesizes abstract and concrete research inquiry, and that challenges regulation academics to identify the necessary and contingent structures, mechanisms, and conditions that combine to produce white‐collar and corporate rule‐breaking behaviors to develop more plausible regulatory interventions, on a spectrum from immediate to long‐lasting.