SPECULATIONS ON THE CONFLICT OF DISCOURSES: FINANCE, CRIME AND REGULATION Available to Purchase

The paper assumes a conflict between the discourses (domains of language) of finance, criminality and regulation. It suggests that in the recent past transgression of codes has become the norm in financial services practices. Utilising the idea that profit orientated organisations and operatives are crimogenic and that the border between organised economic activity and organised criminality is negotiable, it further suggests that the strategic deployment of nomination in relation to economic activities involving financial services serves to neutralise responses which would ordinarily classify these activities as deviant and subject to orthodox criminalisation. Without recourse to unified definitions and standards of criminality, the effectiveness of rational regulatoiy responses is flawed from the beginning. The paper raises broader questions regarding governmentality, legitimation and anomie. The deregulation, technologisation and internationalisation of the London financial markets has served to remove a central source of regulator authority (the State and its institutional agencies). Regulation through compliance suggests that the responsibility for legitimation and the production of values and ethics resides with the practitioners themselves who operate in a state of anomie (normlessness) in response to risk (financial risk and norm‐breaking risk). The absence of a grounded discourse of criminality operative within the con sciousness of practitioners and regulators enables ethical and moral relativity to flourish. The paper ends with a call for a restatement of criminological ‘labelling’ theory and for this to become an element in the informing theoretical criteria in future studies of fraudulent activity.