“Obviously, we’re all oil industry”: The criminogenic structure of the offshore oil industry

Abstract

The 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill was one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States. The deviant actions of state and corporate actors involved in the Gulf of Mexico spill are not unique, but instead are symptomatic of a problem rooted much deeper in the US oil and gas industry. Building on Michalowski and Kramer's Integrated Theoretical Model of State-Corporate Crime, this article explores the industry as a level of analysis. Early studies of white-collar crime that examined criminality within industries tended to approach the problem from the individual level and failed to consider the role of government in shaping the structural conditions of an industry. This article introduces the concept of "criminogenic industry structures" and examines the historical role of the federal government in shaping the criminogenic conditions of the offshore oil drilling industry that resulted in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. KeywordsBP oil spill, criminogenic industry structure, environmental crime, Minerals Management Service, normalization of deviance, state-corporate crime Michalowski and Kramer's (2006) Integrated Theoretical Model of State-Corporate Crime allows for a consideration of the opportunity, motivations and social controls involved in government and corporate deviance at the interactional, organizational and

Regulation and governance versus criminology: Disciplinary divides, intersections, and opportunities

“…This lens diverts attention more typically to a focus on disruptions such as disasters and failures, and to questions such as “What went wrong?” and “Why did this happen?” . While regulatory scholars do focus on discontinuities, they tend to view such exceptional events as highlighting the tensions within, and limitations of, stable regulatory systems (Haines ; Casey & Lawless ; Mills & Koliba ; Hutter & Lloyd‐Bostock 2017), rather than treating them, as criminology often does, as fundamental political challenges to those systems (Calavita & Pontell ; Bradshaw ; Tombs ). Some scholars who straddle these disciplinary boundaries have contributed work that combines both a grasp of institutional process and influence, and a broader sense of the importance of political context (e.g.…”

“…; Nielsen & Parker ). At the level of firms themselves, these explanations have included the existence of anomic discrepancies between cultural social goals and the institutional means of firms (Passas ; Young ; van de Bunt & van Wingerde ), the criminogenic structural necessities of the contemporary capitalist system (Punch ; Tombs & Whyte ), and the creation of industry‐wide cultures of motivation, opportunity, and control (Williams ; Bradshaw ; Fligstein & Roehrkasse ).…”

“…On this view, those regulatory measures can also translate into ambivalent forms of oversight, and a permissive business regulatory culture which, if not causing offending, play an important explanatory role as “contributing precedents” (Michalowski & Kramer ). Many explanations of corporate and white‐collar crime, which focus on systemic causes and macro‐meso‐micro connections, emphasize the role that ambiguities in the regulatory context play in shaping individual behavior (Nelken ), as in the Madoff frauds (Young ), the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (Bradshaw ), and in real estate frauds (van de Bunt & van Wingerde ). These factors are also relevant in the explanation of failures of transnational regulation and governance.…”

Negative organizational dynamics as enabler of white-collar crime

“…Examples of corporate crime include manipulation of financial figures for tax evasion and unjustified government subsidies, bribery to obtain contracts, false loan applications to obtain credit in banks, and money laundering in tax havens to recruit securities clients. The organizational anchoring of crime is evident in corporate offenses as crime takes place within the business and to the benefit of business (Bradshaw, 2015).…”

State Aid and Taxation of Transnational Companies: A Study of State-Corporate Crime

“…The concern here is that the symbiosis between such actors increasingly blurs because the players of these roles can easily switch positions. In this respect, Bradshaw (2015) argued that revolving doors normalize deviance among members of industries and agencies responsible for regulating and controlling these industries.…”