State-Corporate Crime and Major Financial Institutions: Interrogating an Absence

The concept of state-corporate crime has been invoked and applied quite widelyfor more than 20 years now. We acknowledge the value of this concept but hereaddress some of its conceptual limitations, especially in relation to crimes oflarge-scale investment and commercial banks, government-sponsored enterprisesand international financial institutions. If the concept of state-corporatecrime calls attention to the character and consequences of significant forms ofcrimes of the powerful, it tends to exclude attention to other forms of suchcrime. This article also addresses Steve Tombs' critique of state-corporatecrime as it applies to what are here characterized as crimes of globalization.It considers the conundrum involved in a tension between achieving theoreticalsophistication and in promoting effective responses to crimes of the powerful.It is a core premise of the analysis set forth here that in a rapidly changing,increasingly globalized twenty-first-century world, the forms of crime addressedhere will necessarily attract more attention, especially relative to thetraditional focus on conventional crime. A criminology that aspires to remainrelevant in this environment must transform its understanding of crime.