From Economic Crime to Corporate Violence: The Multifaceted Harms of Corporate Crime

The study of white-collar and corporate crime has long been focusing mainly on its economic consequences, due to its connection with legitimate professional and business activities. Yet, even since E.H. Sutherland’s seminal studies, there has been a lingering sense of the broader scope of harmful consequences of corporate crime. This essay focuses on the social ‘anomic’ harm related to an ingrained feature of abuse of trust, typical of corporate crimes, as well as the increasing awareness of the ever growing spread and negative impact on human life and health of offences falling under the definition of ‘corporate violence’.