The Internal Review of Corporate Deviance

8 White-Collar Deviance as Social Harm: Stakeholders, Conformance and the Social License

Crime is usually defined as violation of laws, consequently if there is no law sanctioning an offence, then it follows that the action is no crime. However, criminological theory offers a much wider scope in terms of conception of social harm or public censure, contending that the terms offence and offender might be applied even in the absence of official sanctions. The position here is that an act can qualify as social harm tantamount to criminal offence if it satisfies two requirements. First, that the public think that it is wrong to do it, and; second, that the public think that if someone does it, the person or entity should receive scrutiny or punishment. ...