In this chapter, the need for a criminological approach in order to study and better understand RM will be defended. It will be argued that criminology is especially well equipped, from a theoretical and methodological point of view, to produce empirical knowledge about RM, and to sustain theories about its causes, processes, and harms , as well as about the formal and informal social reactions to it. Specifically, much of what has been produced about white-collar crime , in its sub-dimensions of occupational and organizational crime , may be applied to the topic of RM. In fact, much has been written about deterrence, sanctions , and rules, as well as about the causes of this kind of devianceâand most of these accounts, to be presented in Chapter 2, have been conducted by scientific fields outside criminology . Nonetheless, criminology is the disciplinary field better prepared to debate and study numerous dimensions of transgressive, deviant, or criminal behaviour. Moreover, while criminology has produced research on the topic, although timidly, research on the topic of RM is still widely concentrated in other disciplinary fields. For this reason, the book will argue for the need for criminological knowledge about these issues, and in this respect it identifies an area of criminological intervention and research still to be systematically explored.
It will be shown that there is ambiguity not only about what is considered problematic about RM, but also about who is concerned with the situation. At the same time, an âinfra-penalityâ (Foucault 1975) seems to have been in the making over the past few years, at least in Europe. This âinfra-penalityâ refers to the diversity of rules and regulations, and disciplinary measures applied to the scholar, currently in place for tackling RM. This statement also enables a preview of the main results of the research to be presented in the chapters that follow. This chapter will, firstly, summarize some of the studies produced in the criminological field about RM, but also pinpoint its current limitations. Secondly, several analogies will be made between researching RM and other topics typically falling under studies of white-collar crime : comparisons will be drawn with conceptual conundrums, methods of research, the interaction between professional or occupational roles and organizational settings, ambiguity in rules and regulations, social control, and harms and victimization . Before all that, however, a brief reflection will be provided on what, precisely, this thing called criminology is.
1.1 The Relevance of Criminology
As will be shown in the next chapter, RM may comprise fabrication and falsification of data plagiarism , as well as other questionable research practices (henceforth QRP ). It thus has to do with specific forms of misconduct committed by specific professionals at the heart of a concrete professional activity, scientific research, which, in turn, usually takes place within legitimate professional and organizational settings, such as higher education institutions (henceforth HEIs ). In criminology , the topic of RM has been slowly but steadily entering the realm of enquiry. Nonetheless, if one wishes to review criminological literature on the subject, some questions about what criminology is should first be posed. Its epistemological frontiers with other fields are quite flexible, and, for some authors, criminology may be seen both as a field of study and as an activity of knowledge production (Pires 1995). In the first case, there are several scientific disciplines producing knowledge on a shared theme: understanding crime and crime control. In the second case, criminology is regarded not so much as an autonomous science, but more as a disciplinary field sharing its topics, methods, and domain of enquiry with other sciences, such as psychology or sociology, but also with law and ethics , while embracing an autonomous process of institutionalization and of academic and professional scholarly activity.
Garland (1994) considers criminology to be âa specific genre of discourse and inquiry about crimeâ (p. 7) that has emerged during the modern period owing to the convergence between what may be called a scientific project (as initially proposed by Lombroso) and the governmental project. The first promised the possibility of producing empirical knowledge about the causes of crime and the criminal man; the second project aimed to understand patterns of crime in order to assist the criminal justice system. However, recent changes in the âlandscapes of crime, order and controlâ (Loader and Sparks 2012, p. 4) have demanded new epistemological and theoretical reflections about criminology âs expansion in different dimensions, including its growing autonomy, meshed with a lack of paradigmatic unity, as well as national particularities (Swaaningen 2006). This lack of unity had already been recognized in the sense that, since the appearance of labelling theory, criticism has been showered over the positivistic (and neo-positivistic) traditional approaches to the study of crime and deviance. Instead, new research was showing that âthere was no objective reality to reflect, only a process of ongoing action and reaction, of contested meaning changing with audience and meaningâ (Ferrell et al. 2008, p. 37).
It is not intended to provide an overview of epistemological debates about the scientific status of criminology , or of its historical development over the last 200 years, and it suffices to say, for now, that the definition of a criminological study or research is open to discussion. Nonetheless, the present work (along with the empirical research to be offered in the following chapters) does conclude that RM should be considered a topic of research for criminology . One last word on the complicated issue of what criminology is and whether RM should be considered one of its topics of enquiry: by assuming that crime has no ontological reality, and that deviance is in the eye of the beholder (Becker 1966), this work on RM shares the idea that studying it has to âtake into consideration the social processes that problematize scientific practices (behaviours) as not acceptable or deviantâ (Buggenhout and Christiaens 2016, p. 3). Or, as Hulsman (1986, 1998) puts it, one should understand that, rather than crime or deviance, there are situations, and that these are interpreted differently, with some being interpreted as problematic by some of those concerned with them. The actors engaged in problematization of RM, as well as the meanings assigned and mechanisms operating to problematize RM, are at the core of the empirical research to be presented in Chapters 4 and 5.
What results is that, if one regards RM as a situation or set of situations that may or may not be considered problematic by different actors, one will not only be interested in looking at patterns of behaviour, incidence, or prevalence. One will also be interested in enquiring about how all those who intervene in the scientific system , all those who take part in the process of attributing meanings and all those who construct social processes, such as naming and reacting (eventually through shaming) or not reacting at all to RM. This is especially true when such processes occur inside legitimate organizations and in accordance with professional and deontological rules and, thus, within specific frames of subjective interpretation of individuals who are influenced, to some extent, by their organizational surroundings (Crozier and Friedberg 1977). More recently, Hillyard and Tombs (2004), arguing for zemiology instead of criminology , have continued criticism of using the notion of crime, replacing it with the Social Harms approach. This states that there are situations and behaviours worth studying even when they do not count as crimes, simply because such situations and behaviours cause harms and because crime is the product of power relations that, in turn, are not sufficiently focused upon by traditional criminology . The final pages of this book will help to explain the ...