Corporate crime: a logical misconception, but with one analytical point

Purpose - In 1988, Donald Cressey published a previously overlooked article. According to Cressey, there was a lack in the agenda of corporate crime research concerning theory and conceptual precision of what exactly the scientific object was and how it could reinforce our understanding of white-collar criminality. Cressey stated the idea that a fictitious person, like a corporation, upon which were bestowed properties such as a will of its own (intentions and motivations) and a consciousness to act morally and ethically have a responsibility to follow the order of law, leads to a fundamental theoretical problem in terms of discovering the causes of crimes committed by such a fictitious person. I follow this line of thought about the arguments made by representatives of corporate crime. Specifically, I follow the concept of “decoupling”, by using various techniques of formal logic. The conclusion is that the concept of corporate crime is a logical contradiction (an eternal false statement), but the research has one analytical point which must be incorporated into the research of white-collar criminality: how structural conditions of a corporation’s policy and strategy “produce” or influence the individuals within the corporation to make decisions. Design/methodology/approach - This paper is a research paper based on the technic of formal logic. The design of this research is sentence and modal logic. Findings - The concept of corporate crime is logically a contradiction. Thereby it has no value in the research agenda of white-collar criminality. Originality/value - To the best of the author’s knowledge, no one has done a formal logical analysis based on modal logic to investigate the consistence of the concept corporate crime.