Publications
Publications
- 2022
- A Research Agenda for Financial Crime
Corporate Misconduct’s Relevance to Society through Everyday Misconduct
By: Eugene Soltes
Abstract
Terms like "corporate misconduct" and "white-collar crime" typically bring to mind major scandals like Enron or Bernie Madoff. This popular perception overlooks another important—and in fact much more typical—type of deviance: "everyday misconduct." Everyday misconduct encompasses a variety of harmful behaviors that may be more limited in scale or severity, but much more widespread in their reach and impact on ordinary people. In this chapter, I broadly categorize everyday misconduct as internal misconduct, which is generally hidden from public view within organizations, and loophole misconduct, in which ethically problematic behavior does not clearly or necessarily violate any regulation or company policy. While pervasive—with past research indicating that large companies see an internal violation every three days—internal and loophole misconduct are by nature difficult to uncover. More focused research, alongside growing interest from journalistic investigations and popular movements like #MeToo, has great potential to increase awareness and knowledge among the public, regulators, and business leaders, and to find effective ways to curtail the most commonplace kinds of misconduct.
Keywords
Citation
Soltes, Eugene. "Corporate Misconduct’s Relevance to Society through Everyday Misconduct." Chap. 2 in A Research Agenda for Financial Crime, edited by Barry Rider, 31–48. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.