A Sociolegal Analysis of White-Collar Crime, Organizational Deviance, and Public Corruption in the Nightlife Economy

This dissertation is an auto-ethnographic case study of white-collar crime, organizational deviance, and public corruption in the nightlife economy of an east coast city in the United States. In addition to providing an empirical account of various forms of crime and deviance, I offer a sociolegal explanation of how these phenomena occur by focusing on two broad processes: i) the extent to which illegal or normatively corrupt activities are structurally incentivized as standard business practices in the local nightlife economy, and ii) how private and public agents have symbiotic relationships regarding the permissibility, nature, extent, and/or parameters of such activities. Guided by a theoretical framework that emphasizes techniques of neutralization and structural contradictions theory, my findings show how participants in the nightlife political economy navigate an ecosystem of normal nightlife corruption. Contributions include demonstrating how – within the environment of study – select forms of white-collar crime and public corruption crime are inextricably linked to conventional institutions and value systems found in economic and social life, and how the nightlife economy contains larger value systems which create conditions favorable to select forms of corruption and white-collar crime.