What Can Management Science Teach Criminology? The Relevance of Organizational Culture for Predicting Organizational Misconduct

Cultural explanations are routinely invoked in regulatory, journalistic, and academic accounts of organizational scandals. Yet despite the broad consensus that organizational culture matters, organizational criminology has produced relatively little systematic work on the concept. By contrast, fields like management sciences, organizational psychology, and safety research have developed an extensive conceptual and empirical literature on the relationship between organizational culture and various forms of misconduct; whether these insights can be translated to the study of corporate and organizational crime is, however, an open question. The present paper addresses this question through an integrative review of the literature, evaluating associated empirical outcomes of four organizational culture constructs – ethical culture, safety culture, masculinity culture, and risk culture – against four dimensions of criminologically relevant misconduct: deviance, intentionality, intended target, and impact. It finds that, while these constructs are widely used in management research to explain wrongdoing, and associated with misconduct as operationalized in that field, the outcomes studied tend to fall short of the more deviant, intentional, and harmful behaviors that lie at the heart of organizational criminology. We argue that this represents an opportunity and outline a research agenda for adapting management science constructs and methods to study organizational misconduct.