Criminology and Corporate Crime: The Art of Scientific Cross-Pollination

Abstract

Born of sociology while absorbing ideas and scholarship from other specialties, criminology can legitimately tout its interdisciplinary bona fides. Yet within the field, integration and cross-pollination across subject areas is, far too often, absent. Concentrating on corporate crime and summarizing the literature across a variety of different domains, I demonstrate that criminology, as a discipline, benefits from knowledge generated by corporate crime scholarship and vice versa. I discuss why it is essential to build a multidisciplinary knowledge base that informs and draws from corporate crime scholarship while also addressing critical epistemological challenges and knowledge gaps that confound integrative efforts. I conclude with potential areas of synergy ranging from the theoretical (organizational life cycle/life course and decision-making in different contexts) to new/old forms of crime and crime control associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.