Regimes of Permission and State-Corporate Crime

Abstract

The state-corporate crime literature has given momentum to a fundamentally important task: that of “bringing the state back in” to the study of the social harms caused by corporations. Yet as this article argues, we need to widen the theoretical scope of the concept of “state-corporate crime” if we are to grasp the full significance of state-corporate symbiosis in the production of corporate crime. The article argues for a historically and systemically sensitive analysis of the state-corporate relation that takes account of the a priori constitutional features of the relationship between states and corporations in contemporary capitalist democracies. The article therefore uses the state-corporate crime literature as a point of departure for understanding a deeper structural relation between organized capital and state institutions.