This paper explores the motivations behind enterprise and white-collar crime by drawing on criminological theory and business ethics scholarship. It critically evaluates three folk explanations commonly offered for criminal behavior — character defects, greed, and irregular values — and finds each explanation insufficient on its own. The paper argues that corporate crime is better understood through socialization theory, rational choice frameworks, and the emergence of deviant subcultures within specific industries. Drawing on thinkers such as Edwin Sutherland and scholars like Heath, Friedrichs, and Schwartz, it contends that institutional structures and social environments play a more decisive role in motivating enterprise crime than individual moral failings alone.
The paper demonstrates the technique of critical evaluation through structured refutation. Each folk explanation (character, greed, values) is first presented charitably, then systematically challenged with empirical data and theoretical reasoning. This "present and critique" structure is an effective approach for academic papers that seek to shift a reader's assumptions toward a more sophisticated framework.
The paper opens with a framing of business ethics alongside criminality, then surveys the phenomenon of white-collar crime broadly. It transitions into a theoretical core organized around three folk motivational theories, each assigned its own section. The conclusion introduces labelling theory and Sutherland's differential association concept to redirect toward social and institutional explanations. The overall movement is from common misconception to theoretical complexity, following a classic "problem–critique–alternative" essay structure.
Among the peculiar aspects of business ethics, especially in comparison with other domains of applied ethics, is that it deals with a wide array of human matters that are more often than not touched by serious criminality, as well as an institutional structure and atmosphere that is also frequently inclined toward criminal behavior (Hilts, 2003). This oddity may be lost on professionals within the field. It is quite common, for example, at business ethics discussions for presentations to become more concerned with straightforward criminality while tending to avoid the ethical issues within these debates — which is precisely where we find frequent questions about the correct strategies for countering crime.
In this way, discussions of so-called "ethics dilemmas" at the beginning of the twenty-first century remain very misleading, because the truth is that whatever happened at companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat, among others, was primarily an episode of sophisticated and extensive white-collar crime before anything else. Each criminal action was surrounded by an extensive area of unethical behavior, and that is primarily why, in all such situations, the core actions were mostly in direct conflict with the law (Hilts, 2003).
If criminology, which is currently treated as an area of academic endeavor, manages to survive within this context, there is a strong probability that its focus on the entire range of "conventional" types of crime and their control will take a prominent place in the future. Proportionality is, nevertheless, a primary challenge to the character of modern criminology. An alternative premise of criminological concern could be framed as follows: there is an inverse association between the actual amount of damage or crime triggered by an individual or a specific business activity and the amount of criminological attention given to it. Individuals who are calling for the creation and implementation of a globally accepted and transnational criminology expect at least a basic reordering of the top criminological priorities that hamper the corporate world today. They also anticipate much more proportional attention being given to the extensive types of harm that are generated, rather than to the traditional small-scale types of damage that have thus far defined conventional crime (Friedrichs and Schwartz, 2008).
The prevalence of crime within the corporate environment is, by itself, something of a mystery. Most educated adults would not consider committing crimes like shoplifting from a neighborhood store whether or not they had the opportunity to do so. Nevertheless, according to statistics provided by a United States Chamber of Commerce study, more than 75% of employees within corporations steal from their employers through fraud or other petty corporate crimes (Hilts, 2003). Studies of convenience store and restaurant employees found that 42% of convenience store employees and 60% of restaurant employees admitted to having stolen from their employer within the previous twelve months (as cited in Heath, 2008).
The losses resulting from vocational or corporate crimes committed by employees greatly exceed the total economic losses attributable to street crime. Furthermore, these losses are compounded when corporate crimes are committed by employees acting for their own benefit or for competing corporations. Throughout the 1990s, the total number of corporations charged with significant criminal offenses in the United States included — either as parent companies, owners, or subsidiaries — companies such as BASF, Banker's Trust, IBM, Hyundai, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Chevron, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Mitsubishi, among others (Mokhiber, 2006).
The phenomenon of white-collar crime casts a lengthy shadow over dialogue on business ethics. Perhaps its most important effect has been the introduction of a strong emphasis on moral incentives within business ethics. In several areas of applied ethics — for example, bioethics — it is frequently clear what the right course of action is. In business ethics, however, there is often no real dilemma about the substance of moral responsibilities (i.e., what one ought to do); the dilemma lies in providing people with the incentives to act on them. The moral rules are frequently quite straightforward and, based on a given community and its culture, often correspond with state laws. The challenging questions arise at the level of compliance: how to proceed when a competitor gains an advantage through deception, or when a manager orders classified records to be tampered with or destroyed, or when ethical responsibilities conflict with harsh practical realities. Consequently, business ethicists have shown substantial concern about the relationship between moral responsibility and self-interest — whether in discussions about market strategies or other organizational matters — and whether ethics can be meaningfully taught (Williams and Dewett, 2005).
Criminologists also have a longstanding preoccupation with motivational questions, because crime prevention is a significant part of their mandate. Considerable resources have been devoted to studying the causes of crime, resulting in a rich and complex body of scholarship. Given that business ethicists share similar aims, it is reasonable to expect that this research would serve as an essential source of knowledge and inspiration (as cited in Heath, 2008).
It would be an oversimplification to speak of a single, unified "criminological perspective" on white-collar crime. Criminologists differ, as do experts in any academic domain, and the field is divided into numerous competing schools of thought (e.g., see Johnson, 2005). Nonetheless, there are also numerous very broad presuppositions that are widely shared within the discipline, which may seem counterintuitive to outsiders. These comprise extremely common ideas and methods refined during the early years of academic training in the field, and are consequently treated as foundational. It is these shared ideas and methods — largely uncontested among specialists — that constitute the "criminological perspective."
The most important initial aspect of the criminological perspective is that it consistently tries to explain why individuals act with criminal and harmful inclinations. What most criminologists find mysterious is not that some people are inclined to commit crimes, but rather that more people do not commit more harmful crimes more frequently. When viewed from the perspective of personal incentives, only a small number of individuals who could achieve their goals through criminal acts actually choose to do so. Even though illegal activity is punished, legislation typically does not supply sufficient external incentives for compliance — the likelihood of apprehension after a crime is committed is often remote, and the deterrent effect of punishment is considerably attenuated. Hence, understanding why people commit crimes is essential for designing more effective prevention and counter-strategies (Johnson, 2005).
The conventional answer to this problem is to identify a form of socialization that people undergo in the passage from infancy to adulthood, which aligns individual preferences and inclinations with social expectations in a way that people develop a desire to adhere to institutional norms. According to sociological theory, this convergence of self-interest and role expectations is "the hallmark of institutionalization." Researchers use the term deviance in a technical sense to describe motivated activity in which an individual has, given the right circumstances, built the capacity to develop the requisite orientations but fails to do so. The individual manages to maintain certain deviations from the complementary expectations of conformity because these deviations are relevant to the definition of his or her particular role. Deviance consequently engages diverse mechanisms of social control aimed at incentivizing individuals to abandon their deviant habits and return to conformity — that is, to rebuild the fundamental structure of institutionalization. The most important tool in this regard is the imposition of external sanctions and supports, which work together to create a superior configuration of self-interest and communal roles — not just by reshaping external motivations to encourage conformity, but by designing them flexibly enough to reduce the intensity of anti-social choices (McLean and Elkind, 2004).
This theoretical framework, which was prominently foundational in early American sociology, has numerous significant implications. The first is that it explains crime as a form of deviance rather than as a mere mechanical failure of institutional structure. Efforts to understand the origins of crime therefore concentrate on failures of social control — breakdowns that are, obviously, interconnected, since the primary instrument of social control (external sanctions) also exercises a socializing effect. This perspective also indicates that "moral" and "legal" standards within a society can be seen on a continuum, with the major distinction being that the former are enforced through informal social sanctions, while the latter are enforced through the coercive power of the state (Vogel, 2005).
This is the broad theoretical framework assumed by the overwhelming majority of criminologists. Rational choice approaches to criminology are also formed as variations of this basic perspective. The intricate difficulties emerge when we take this framework beyond simple rational choice. Applying this framework to explaining criminal motivation turns out to be harder than originally assumed, and many early assumptions about the causes of crime proved to be false. Crime is broadly recognized as a form of deviance, but it is not always obvious where exactly deviance originates. Hence, before searching for the causes of crime, the first step is to identify the precise type of deviance that precedes it. It is clear that the motivations to commit crimes can be broadly grouped into three categories: flawed character, greed, and irregular values (Vogel, 2005). Each is discussed in detail below.
A very common technique for trying to describe the social aspect of criminal activity is to suppose that deviant subcultures share essentially the same internal structure as the dominant society, but that their members hold a different set of values — one not adopted by those outside the group. According to this view, the mechanism that produces "criminal" conduct within the subculture is equivalent to the mechanism that produces "law-abiding" conduct within the larger culture — namely, conformity with a set of shared expectations. The reason the former is labeled "criminal" and the latter is not is simply that the two groups hold dissimilar values, meaning that what is acceptable to one group is unacceptable to the other.
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