ABSTRACT
The theory of convenience suggests that white-collar crime is committed in situations where alternative legitimate actions to avoid problems are more painful and stressful. The extent to which individuals in privileged positions choose to break the law in difficult situations is dependent on their convenience orientation. For example, people with a strong convenience orientation can have a tendency to believe that bankruptcy might be avoided through tax evasion and bank fraud. However, the empirical study in this article provides limited support for the suggestion that convenience orientation has a direct influence on the propensity to crime in terms of criminogenity. Rather, there can be several statistically significant effects from convenience that are indirectly related to criminogenity. The most significant effect is that more conveniently oriented respondents believe that financial crime can solve problems and contribute to exploit possibilities.
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Petter Gottschalk
PETTER GOTTSCHALK is a professor in the department of leadership and organizational behavior at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway. He has been the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at several companies including ABB Datacables and Norwegian Computing Center. Dr. Gottschalk has published extensively on internal investigations, knowledge management, fraud examination, financial crime, police investigations, organized crime, and white-collar crime. He has developed the theory of convenience as an integrated explanation of white-collar offence occurrences.