In recent years, many legal instruments have been developed and policy decisions have been taken in the field of public corruption. There are various reasons for this such as the fear of organised crime, the fear of terrorism, the economic losses, the bad reputation of the market and the loss of trust in the government (Beare, 1997, 66 ff; Williams and Beare, 1999, 113). Initiatives of the European Council, the UN and the OECD have caused a chain of corruption and anti-corruption initiatives at the national
level. The question about the importance of corruption is under discussion when studying recent political-economic changes and more specifically the blurring of boundaries between public and private power and the growing impact of private companies on the political decision making process. A market that gets more chances to pull up a chair at the decision making table maybe has less need to be corrupt in the sense of bribing a politician or a civil servant. The main idea of this article is that corruption is a criminal phenomenon with the possibility of a high victimisation rate. For that reason, the political attention for corruption is reasonable. In the last decades, the relation between the public and the private level has changed from a top-down relation into a fragmentation and a privatisation
of public power. The hypothesis is that the illegal act of corruption in the context of the western market is becoming less important than other legal mechanisms of conflict of interest, being for example the old boys network, lobbying, revolving doors,etc.. In other words corruption is part of a continuum of conflicts of interest, varying from legal to illegal activities but all with a high risk factor of victimisation. If this hypothesis corresponds to reality, the question raises if the focus of criminologists
is not too narrow and if it is not an obligation to study also legal injurious activities besides the criminal law environment. This consideration from a critical criminological point of view reminds us of an old criminological discussion that was held in the field of conflict criminology. Authors such as Quinney argued that “the law represents an institutionalised tool of those in power which functions to provide them with superior moral as well as coercive power in conflict” (Quinney, cited in Sumner, 1994). This
question on the limitation of the study domain has logically been central to the debate on white collar crime since this is the domain of those in power. This issue has become less topical over the last decades until recently a new concept was introduced, namely state-corporate crime. This plain concept of Kramer and Michalowski brought back the older discussions on definition and limitation of the study domain. However, this discussion is not restricted to academic circles; a government or an administration that disregards its duty of serving the public creates an environment “where rules don’t prohibit its own self-enrichment or that of the ruling class. The final concern is the well being of citizens and the equal “(Lambsdorff, 2007). The remainder of this article is organised as follows: the first chapter motivates why the attention for corruption is probably out of balance when compared to other mechanisms of conflict of interest. This imbalance was one of the reasons why some criminologists have taken injurious effects as basic assumption for their criminological research (see e.g. Braithwaite, 1984; Croall, 2001). This feeling of uneasiness about the limitation of criminological research brought the researchers Kramer and Michalowki to the concept ’state-corporate crime’. A short explanation of the origin and meaning of state-corporate crime demonstrates the importance of this change in thinking about corporate crime. This can be illustrated by the domain of conflicts
of interests in the sense that corruption is criminalised while other harmful mechanisms are widely accepted. We explain this with some examples, such as lobbying, networking and revolving doors. Some would call this point of view “conspiracy” while it is simply a completion of an until then incomplete explanation of some kind of injurious corporate activities (Pipes, 1997). Even if the comparison between corruption and legal mechanisms of political influence creates a feeling of uneasiness it is not totally unfounded since some exploratory studies have focused on a kind of interaction between corruption and lobbying. We end this contribution with a plea for the criminological perspective on the continuum of conflicts of interest in the interest of the victims. This contribution is the first step in a research project that aims to study the anticorruption strategies in the public and private sector to prevent public corruption of companies. More specifically, it is a reflection that we have made during the exploratory study of literature on corruption and a study of empirical data collected during an exploratory phase of observations and interviews with public officials and business
representatives. Some documentary sources have been written by journalists or belong to the grey literature even if the work is well-founded.