Motive, opportunity, choice, and corporate illegality

Research on corporate illegality spans several distinct literatures and defies ready integration. This article helps to overcome those problems. Analysis of data from 80 US industrial organizations indicates that lower industry profitability is associated with higher frequencies of detected serious violations of federal environmental laws. Organizational profitability, industry concentration, organization size, structural complexity, organizational decentralization, and ethical climate join this variable in statistical interactions also associated with detected instances of serious environmental violations. However, none of those variables are found to be associated with the incidence of detected nonserious violations. These results provide qualified support for a model of corporate illegality in which illegal behaviors are attributable to the interactive effects of motive, opportunity, and choice. They suggest that illegal corporate activities resist simple explanation, and that future research on corporate illegality should concentrate on further development of multivariable models.