In Search of Donald Campbell

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12198
• Author: John Braithwaite
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016

POLICY ESSAY

CORPORATE CRIME DETERRENCE

In Search of Donald Campbell

Mix and Multimethods

John Braithwaite

Australian National University

Acomprehensive assessment of corporate crime deterrence is long overdue. Natalie

Schell-Busey,Sally Simpson, Melissa Rorie, and Mariel Alper (2016, this issue) have

been diligent and systematic with a tricky meta-analysis. Corporate crime scholars

will be surprised at how many useful studies they have discovered on the effectiveness of

corporate crime deterrence even if they have limits for most tests in the meta-analysis. In

a domain like business regulatory research, high-quality empirical studies by government

agencies around the world usually do not find their way into the academic literature.

It is an underestimated service of meta-analyses like this to organize and display that

data.

Within the considerable limitations of the systematic data available, the conclusions

reached by Schell-Busey et al. (2016) are credible. This policy essay will contend that they

become even more persuasive if criminologists think laterally about studies not included

that are arguably relevant to the inferences at issue. Donald Campbell shines as a light on

the hill guiding how such lateral moves might improve the science.

Increased regulatory inspections seem particularly important in driving strong

detection-driven deterrence in this meta-analysis. Mixing regulatory interventions—with

an enforcement quiver containing diverse arrows of deterrents and remedies—also works in

reducing corporate crime:

Our results suggest that regulatory policies that involve consistent inspections

and include a cooperative or educational component aimed at the industry may

have a substantial impact on corporate offending. However,a mixture of agency

interventions will likely have the biggest impact on broadly defined corporate

The author is thankful for comments on the essay by Ian Ayres, Peter Grabosky, Neil Gunningham, and Hai

Wu. Direct correspondence to John Braithwaite, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National

University, Fellows Rd, ACT 2601 Australia (e-mail: John.Braithwaite@anu.edu.au).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12198 C2016 American Society of Criminology 417

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 2

Policy Essay Corporate Crime Deterrence

crime. . . . Single treatment strategies . . . have minimal-to-no deterrent impact

at the individual and company levels. However, studies examining multiple

treatments produce a significant deterrent effect on individual- and corporate-

level offending. . . . Based on our results, we determine that a mixture of agency

interventions is apt to have the biggest impact. (Schell-Busey et al., 2016)

What kind of mixture and exactly how to combine punishment and persuasion are

questions put on the research agenda by this finding.

Being a Criminologist Can Be a Bad Thing

One mundane, seemingly uncontroversial, conclusion is that more “consistent measures of

corporate crime” are needed: “Simpson and Yeager (2015: 12) observed that the first step

toward solving these problems is to have a sensible, commonly understood, and culturally

shared definition of the phenomenon” (Schell-Busey et al., 2016). Is this really sage advice?

I doubt even Schell-Busey et al. (2016) think so, as evidenced by their useful discussion of

how their conclusions about the efficacy of regulatory inspection are affirmed by studies

beyond their meta-analysis that support an association between inspection and reduced

injury or accident rates (definitely not measures of “corporate crime” even though these

studies sometimes show convergent validity in correlations between compliance rates and

injury rates).

In “normal” criminologies of homicide or armed robbery, for example, what interests

the policy maker and the criminologist are reduction in, or explanation of, the incidence

of homicide or robbery. With environmental crime, in contrast, the interest of both policy

makers and criminologists is in improving compliance with environmental laws as a means

to reduced environmental degradation. Policy makers are not as interested in compliance

with occupational health and safety laws for their own sake as they are in lower levels of

workplace death, disease, and injury. Policy makers and scholars alike are less interested

in law enforcement that reduces the incidence of subprime mortgage fraud than in law

enforcement that succeeds in preventing such abuses from cascading to a global financial

crisis.

Corporate crime is an important subfield of criminology in that it can be shown

that the corporate crimes of even one industry can cause greater losses of lives and

property than all kinds of common crime combined (Dukes, Braithwaite, and Maloney,

2014). That is without even considering the health impacts of mass unemployment after

financial crises that corporate crimes might help induce. Yet corporate crime is a method-

ologically deviant subfield. Corporate criminologists can reasonably be methodologically

focused on outcomes like saving the planet from greenhouse gases, preventing the next

global financial crisis, and saving lives from hazardous products more than on reducing

corporate crime. The paradox is that we need more corporate criminologists, but we need

418 Criminology & Public Policy