Getting Away with It (Or Not): The Social Control of Organizational Deviance

Abstract

The phenomenon of organizations breaking laws and norms in the pursuit of strategic advantage has received substantial attention in recent years. Such transgressions generally elicit the intervention of social control agents seeking to curb deviant behavior and defend the status quo. In some cases, their efforts result in the deviant behavior being suppressed; in other occasions, however, organizational deviance can persist and even be accepted into the very system of rules that was initially challenged. In this paper, we advance a structured view of this process by formulating a theory of the social control of organizational deviance. Building upon the sociological literature, we classify forms of social control based on their cooperativeness and formality; additionally, we shed light on the outcomes of social control by illustrating the conditions under which they are likely to be more or less accommodative of deviant behavior, as well as more or less permanent. In so doing, we contribute to the scholarly understanding of the role of social control in organizational fields, as well as of the advantageousness of deviant behavior as a strategic option for organizations.