Abstract
This chapter focuses on the private efforts of organisations to maintain (or restore) internal order within their organisational context. In a field of security where the state is typically absent, corporate investigators provide start-to-finish services to employers who are faced with internal norm violations. Different sources and methods of investigation are discussed (the corporate investigations), as well as the solutions that may be chosen after the investigations have been finalised (the corporate settlements). While they lack the powers of investigation granted to public police forces, corporate investigators have extensive access to information. Many corporate investigations are settled without the involvement of any public law enforcement agency and stay completely within the private legal sphere. In this sense, corporate investigations create a system of private investigations and justice, which for a large part operates independently from criminal justice systems. This chapter, finally, engages with the question of the implication that the existence of this field of corporate security has for democratic societies by focusing on the autonomy of corporate investigators, public-private relations and the interests that are involved.
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Notes
- 1.
The involvement of investigators with a legal background provides an interesting exception here. Even though to date, it is not entirely clear yet whether legal privilege may be used in the context of investigations (which are supposed to be impartial), the possibility is one of the selling points for investigators with a legal background (see Meerts 2019a).
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Meerts, C.A. (2022). Private and Corporate Investigations: Internal Security Governance Within Organisations. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_30
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