The Subterfuge of Business Integrity: Legal Complicity with Criminal Organizations in Italy

Widely reported corporate scandals and managerial misconducts, ranging from systemic accounting fraud to individual executive greed, have increasingly drawn the attention of business scholars to the need of a new quest for integrity in business. The quest for integrity should go beyond the pure and simple impact produced by the mentioned and well-known big corporations scandals. In fact, looking at the figures of financial resources controlled and earned by criminal organizations, we should also carefully consider the influence exerted by criminal organizations onto the whole economic system. In our paper, we intend to analyze the concept of integrity, focusing on an inter-organizational level, analyzing those cases in which legitimate firms are controlled or influenced by a criminal organization. Adopting this perspective, we focus our attention on the behavior held by firms in contexts characterized by a strong presence of criminal organizations. We describe the analysis of three Italian cases, different in terms of geographical location, sector of activity and nature of organizational actors involved.