Compliance in Practice. Criminalization and Processes of Adjustment in Companies (Using the Example of Pharmaceutical Marketing)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ralf Kölbel
• Subject Area: Criminology ; Criminal Law
• Term: from 2014 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 255711679

This research project aims at analyzing corporate deviance within the healthcare system (pharmaceutical marketing on the verge of corruption). The focus is on the responsiveness of the relevant corporate players to penal regulation and its particular effects of self-regulation related to it (compliance measures). The main interest is on the processes of corporate adaption to changing judicial frameworks, i.e. the question of how they react to the current developments of criminalization, decriminalization and recriminalization as well as the question how corporate compliance measures enforce, undermine or mediate these reactions of conformity, shifting or non-conformity. In this respect, the study should primarily look at the actual local practice rather than at the official compliance strategy of the corporate management. Therefore, the project will use several research techniques attuned to the problem, the main method being individual depth interviews of people who work in the sales departments of pharmaceutical companies and who communicate directly with marketing addressees on a daily basis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Hans Theile