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Challenging Existing Regulatory Approaches for White-Collar and Corporate Crimes

The regulation of crimes and harms occurring at the statecorporate nexus presents ongoing challenges across political systems, markets, and organisations. Thus, a core goal of the Journal of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (JWCCC) is to support new socio-legal and political interventions through targeted policy change and critique (Alvesalo-Kuusi & Barak, 2020), and by embracing proposals to regulate and prevent white-collar and corporate crime from a multidisciplinary background (see for instance Gottschalk, 2021; Mulinari et al., 2021). Notably, experts across disciplines vary in their ideological and methodological approaches to studies of corporate activity and processes of corporate regulation, which span from consensus approaches to conflict driven strategies (Whyte, 2004). In scholarship, this has led to disciplinary divides between regulation-governance studies and corporate criminology (Almond & van Erp, 2020). From the perspective of regulation and governance that emphasize ‘softer’ persuasion, along with associated compliance or ‘social responsibility’-led initiatives, corporate criminology is perceived as prioritizing criminal justice interventions based on coercion and deterrence, at the expense of non-penal interventions within civil society (Almond & Van Erp, 2020). In this line, in the Inaugural Issue of JWCCC, Braithwaite (2020) outlines the gains of responsive regulatory theory. While acknowledging the usefulness of the criminal label for victims of corporate crimes, he argues against excessive criminalization and instead points to multidimensionality in regulatory strategies as the most effective way to tackle crimes of the powerful. Indeed, in recent years growing numbers of studies reveal insufficient deterrence by corporate fines (Mischke et al., 2013; Schell-Busey et al., 2016; Simpson et al., 2014; ), incapacity of criminal justice systems to implement corporate criminal liability (AlvesaloKuusi et al., 2018), and better predisposition to tackle whitecollar and corporate crimes through alternative sanctions (van Erp, 2014), as well as alternative conflict resolution methods (Wortman Jofre, 2019). On the other hand, from more critical perspectives embraced by corporate criminologists, these consensus-oriented approaches to regulation disregard broader systems of inequality and power, in which regulatory strategies emerge and are applied, often in a (deliberately) limited or limiting way. Although there are good reasons to argue in favour of ‘more’ or ‘better’ regulation to address white-collar and corporate crimes, researchers also need to consider why these crimes remain hidden from agencies and other groups such as victims – in other words, how perpetrators maintain their ‘silence’ despite regulatory frameworks (van de Bunt, 2010: 435). Critical studies work to reveal the inherent bias of law and regulation towards the powerful, and to show how different regulatory strategies serve to maintain existing power relations. Within this framing, ‘softer’ persuasion, along with associated compliance or ‘social responsibility’-led selfregulatory initiatives are perceived as a “crime (un)control industry” that allows for law avoidance and distracts from the issues underlining corporate misconduct (Bittle, 2012). Hence, white-collar and corporate crime and harm occurs not because the law and regulation is disobeyed, but rather because it is obeyed (Tombs & Whyte, 2020). Given the conventionalisation of corporate crimes and harms through law and state practices, some consider proposals for more regulation and enforcement to mitigate state-corporate crimes and harms as counterproductive and legitimizing a violent system of control (Rothe, 2020). Ultimately, the disciplinary conflict oscillates around two points; the reformative suggestions within the status quo, and the proposals uncovering and challenging this status-quo. The JWCCC embraces both perspectives. In the absence of significant political-economic or ‘structural’ reform, tangible and practical (if incremental) changes to existing practice have the potential to disrupt harmful organisational practices and prove beneficial to groups such as victims and/or consumers. The contributions of this issue explore the effectiveness, potential and limitations of existing regulatory regimes for white collar crime at different levels of analysis. In general, the discussions on regulating white-collar and corporate crime range from individual/interactional (micro), organisational (meso), and political-economic (macro) factors (e.g., Bradshaw, 2014). Across these analytic themes are efforts to situate individual behaviour in broader contexts,