Two-Way Relationship between Corporate Values and Assumptions and Criminogenic Corporate Culture

The criminogenic corporate culture as a new concept in the domain of empirical criminology studies is rooted in organizational behavior studies. This term refers to a form of organizational culture in which crime is committed as a normal thing. Hence, the cause of crime, in some companies and industrial spheres, is the existence of a crime culture that leads to the normative validation of illegal behavior and the incentive structure for doing these behaviors. By providing the normative guideline, companies offer permission to commit illegal and immoral behaviors under certain conditions to their practitioners and take incentives and safeguards to comply with or violate these norms. Therefore, the culture of crime is defined as an organizational and social truth, which is defined in terms of the ethical values existing in an organization that originates from underlying assumptions. This research seeks to examine the corporate culture by using the Schein organizational culture model, which consists of three layers of Artifacts, values and assumptions. The findings of this study indicate that organizational imagination and distortion of reality in the organization's visible areas are among the reasons that led to the ineffectiveness of the artifact layer in the analysis of the corporate culture of crime. Nevertheless, the underlying values and assumptions of an organization as inseparable parts of Schein's organizational culture can perfectly analyze the organizational culture of crime. Accordingly, in organizations with a mass culture, the expected behavior of the workers will be a crime, because in the core of organizational culture, committing a crime is considered as a value. Nonetheless, fundamental assumptions as unwritten value systems in an organization that identify corporate paradigms create the values ​​of an organization.