Policing corporate crime: A typology of enforcement styles

Abstract

In the past few years, journalists, politicians, and business spokes-persons have all leveled criticisms against regulatory enforcement agencies—some charging that agencies are too lenient to be effective, others that strict enforcement has created useless hardships for industry. Most scholarly research on regulatory enforcement has sought to find the reasons why an agency (or inspectors) adopt either a conciliatory or a stringent approach to enforcement. A different facet of this issue is to ask how an enforcement strategy is implemented through the organizational structure and culture of the agency. This paper develops a typology that focuses on the organizational processes through which an enforcement strategy is implemented.