The Profits of Recognition: A Praxeological Approach to Corporate Crime

Abstract

This paper offers a methodological intervention into the study and understanding of regulation and compliance with respect to corporate crime. We advocate Pierre Bourdieu’s “praxeological” sociology as the bases for what we hold is an innovative model of regulation and compliance. The praxeological or relational approach offers structural analyses that take seriously the constructivist fixation with meaning, subjectivity, and perception without succumbing to the limitations of an interactionist conception of power. We first show theoretical affinities between the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Althusser in order to highlight their shared concern with subject formation and their respective conceptions of “mis/recognition”. As this provides us with the theoretical basis of a more robust theory of regulation and compliance than is commonly found within the corporate crime literature, we argue that studies of corporate wrongdoing would benefit from rethinking the conceptions of compliance that currently shape corporate crime scholarship. We then demonstrate the benefits of this praxeological approach to regulation and compliance through discussion of the state’s efforts to discipline corporations through criminal law in Canada and the United Kingdom.