Corporate failures and financial crisis in the early 21st century generated an increased awareness of the pervasiveness of corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance. In addition to the tremendous financial costs to society and the loss of public confidence in corporations and social institutions, corporate wrongdoing adversely effects corporations by undermining profits, morale, and trust.
Understanding contemporary corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance requires an examination of the extent to which historical variation in organizational, political-legal, and ideology arrangements affect opportunities for managers to engage in these behaviors. These components of the social structure are not mutually exclusive but are part of a dynamic system that consists of many interconnected component parts. As a whole, the literature examined here suggests that the components of the formal and informal structure create incentives, motivations, and opportunities to engage in corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
The emphasis on social structure is critical to advance our understanding of how corporate political embeddedness, the social organization of markets, and corporate characteristics all affect wrongdoing. The main findings include the following.
1.Contemporary research confirms and extends Sutherland’s initial insight that differential social structure creates variation in opportunities to engage in corporate crime. Corporate characteristics, including structure, size, vertical integration, prestige, cognitive assumptions, corporate norms, dependence on institutional investors, bounded rationality, opportunities, and political embeddedness, are associated with corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance.
2.Corporations in the United States engaged in political behavior to re-regulate multiple spheres of corporations’ political embeddedness that permitted management to enter existing markets, create new markets, and engage in high-risk behaviors in them.
3.Corporate culture and ethics interact with markets and other dimensions of the social structure to create normative conditions conducive to corporate corruption and fraud.
4.Individual characteristics, including chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) age and the networks among top management and corporate boards, affect corporate corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
5.Given that few policy changes were implement in the 2008 post-crisis era, the political embeddedness and characteristics of corporations continue to provide opportunities for corporations and their agents to engage in corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
Article
Corporate Fraud, Corruption, and Financial Malfeasance
Harland Prechel
Article
Online Terrorism and Violent Extremism
Ryan Scrivens and Tiana Gaudette
Since the turn of the 21st century, advances in computer technology have revolutionized how people connect, communicate, and interact at a rapid pace. Increasingly, computer technologies and computer-mediated communications have been used by individuals to connect with one another from around the globe. The Internet’s seamless accessibility and user-friendly interface have revolutionized the sharing of information and communications. Terrorists and violent extremists, among many others, have exploited the Internet and its expanding digital landscape, evolving into transnational networks through modern information and communication technologies. Indeed, the Internet has served as a central hub for terrorist groups to connect, recruit, and mobilize as well as distribute propaganda and plan attacks within and outside domestic borders. It should come as no surprise, then, that online terrorism and violent extremism research has grown rapidly in recent years, and so too have the practitioner and policymaker responses to the threat of radicalization to extremist violence.
Article
Place Managers and Crime Places
John E. Eck
Place management theory—a part of routine activity theory—explains why a relatively few places have a great deal of crime while most places have little or no crime. The explanation is the way place managers carry out their four primary functions: organization of space, regulation of conduct, control of access, and acquisition of resources.
Place managers are those people and organizations that own and operate businesses, homes, hotels, drinking establishments, schools, government offices, places of worship, health centers, and other specific locations. They can even operate mobile places such as busses, trains, ships, and aircraft. Some are large—a multi-story office tower for example—while others are tiny—a bus stop, for example. Place managers are important because they can exercise control over the people who use these locations and in doing so contribute to public order and safety. Consequently, it is important to understand place management, how it can fail, and what one can do to prevent failures.
Place management has implications beyond high-crime sites. When crime places are connected, they can create crime hot spots in an area. The concentration of high crime places can inflate crime in a neighborhood. Moreover, place management can be applied to virtual locations, such as servers, websites, and other network infrastructures.
There is considerable evaluation evidence that place managers can change high crime locations to low crime locations. Research also shows that displacement to other places, though possible, is far from inevitable. Indeed, research shows that improving a high crime place can reduce crime at places nearby places. Although much of this research has studied how police intervene with place managers, non-police regulatory agencies can carry out this public safety function.
Article
Positive Criminology: Theory, Research, and Practice
Natti Ronel and Ety Elisha
Positive criminology is an innovative perspective that underlies existing theories and models emphasizing the positive forces that influence and assist individuals at risk and offenders in their recovery process. The theories and models included in positive criminology (e.g., peacemaking criminology, social acceptance, crime desistance, restorative justice) are not new; its novelty lies in their inclusion in a unique and distinct conceptualization. This has led to a shift in discourse and research in criminology, which goes beyond focusing on risk and criminogenic factors while focusing on the positive factors and strengths that help individuals to rehabilitate and successfully integrate into the community.
Studies and practices developed over the past decade have confirmed and reinforced the assumptions of the positive criminology perspective. Despite its specific limitations, positive criminology provides a promising platform for further developments and innovations in research in theory (e.g., positive victimology, spiritual criminology) and in practice (e.g., restorative justice, problem-solving courts, community policing).
Article
Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Crime Prevention Evaluations
Anthony Petrosino, Claire Morgan, and Trevor Fronius
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become a focal point of evidence-based policy in criminology. Systematic reviews use explicit and transparent processes to identify, retrieve, code, analyze, and report on existing research studies bearing on a question of policy or practice. Meta-analysis can combine the results from the most rigorous evaluations identified in a systematic review to provide policymakers with the best evidence on what works for a variety of interventions relevant to reducing crime and making the justice system fairer and more effective. The steps of a systematic review using meta-analysis include specifying the topic area, developing management procedures, specifying the search strategy, developing eligibility criteria, extracting data from the studies, computing effect sizes, developing an analysis strategy, and interpreting and reporting the results.
In a systematic review using meta-analysis, after identifying and coding eligible studies, the researchers create a measure of effect size for each experimental versus control contrast of interest in the study. Most commonly, reviewers do this by standardizing the difference between scores of the experimental and control groups, placing outcomes that are conceptually similar but measured differently (e.g., such as re-arrest or reconviction) on the same common scale or metric. Though these are different indices, they do measure a program’s effect on some construct (e.g., criminality). These effect sizes are usually averaged across all similar studies to provide a summary of program impact. The effect sizes also represent the dependent variable in the meta-analysis, and more advanced syntheses explore the role of potential moderating variables, such as sample size or other characteristics related to effect size.
When done well and with full integrity, a systematic review using meta-analysis can provide the most comprehensive assessment of the available evaluative literature addressing the research question, as well as the most reliable statement about what works. Drawing from a larger body of research increases statistical power by reducing standard error; individual studies often use small sample sizes, which can result in large margins of error. In addition, conducting meta-analysis can be faster and less resource-intensive than replicating experimental studies. Using meta-analysis instead of relying on an individual program evaluation can help ensure that policy is guided by the totality of evidence, drawing upon a solid basis for generalizing outcomes.
