Introduction

In their 2015 volume on white-collar and corporate crime in Europe, Lord and Levi (2015) argue that much work remains to be done if we want to really understand white-collar crime prevention. We not only need to understand more about the phenomenon of whitecollar crime itself, for example, by combining quantitative data with qualitative information (Lord and Levi, 2015), but also about the efforts to prevent it. This implies that researchers should move beyond ‘crude indicators of levels of enforcement’ such as prosecution data (Lord and Levi, 2015: 41) and look at descriptors of a broad range of types of regulation, of which criminal prosecution is just one. It is to that latter research agenda, using mixed methods research to understand white-collar crime prevention, that this chapter intends to contribute.

Specifically, this chapter will propose a number of building blocks for a theoretical framework to address the question of ‘what works in the prevention of corporate and occupational crime?’; moreover, it will argue that Europe provides a promising environment to test and further develop such a framework. An important advantage of the European, and particularly the European Union (EU), context is that a number of relevant environmental characteristics (for example, EU law and policies) are shared, while there is still important and theoretically useful variation across countries, industries and organizations.

These reflections will be formulated in three steps. First, the chapter will present a number of classifications by which to map variation in corporate and occupational crime-prevention approaches in Europe. After the presentation of a classification used within ethics management at the organizational level and a classification used within regulation at the industry level, it will argue for a more generic classification drawn from grid-group cultural theory. Second, against the background of those classifications, this chapter will identify the building blocks of a theoretical framework that could guide research on the impact of efforts to prevent corporate and occupational crime. Third, some designs for empirical research within the EU to test and further develop the proposed theoretical framework will be briefly discussed.

Mapping variation in the prevention of corporate and occupational crime

Before addressing approaches to prevention, it is useful to first delineate what it is that is to be prevented. This is a common challenge in the field of white-collar crime research, notorious for its conceptual and terminological debates.