Corporate Compliance and Conformity

Book excerpt: Traditionally, control in organizations is concerned with top-down approaches, where executives attempt to direct their employees’ attention, behaviors, and performance to align with the organization’s goals and objectives. This book takes a new approach by turning the problem of control upside down as it focuses on control of executives who find white-collar crime convenient. The bottom-up approach to executive compliance focuses on organizational measures to make white-collar crime less convenient for potential offenders. Rather than focusing on the regulatory formalities and staged procedures of compliance and audits, the book emphasizes the organizational challenges involved in compliance work when trusted corporate officials exhibit deviant behavior, refining, and advancing knowledge in this field by reference to contemporary international case studies and associated original evaluative research. The themes and cases covered are carefully selected to provide the reader with an insight into professional conduct and procedural practice – the organization of corporate compliance success, failure, and corruption – with the theory of convenience placed at the fore. It is the bottom-up approach by application of convenience theory that makes the proposed book unique compared to other books on corporate compliance. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and upper-level students researching and studying in the areas of business administration, organizational behavior, corporate and white-collar crime, as well as business ethics and auditing.