There has been a transformation in the number and the scope of criminal laws relating to forms of market misconduct. Surprisingly, however, this area of criminal law is not one that has been systematically explored in recent writing about criminalisation. However, concepts such as white-collar crime, or financial crime, which are widely used to describe this area, are poorly defined and offer little analytic clarity. This paper argues that to take market crimes seriously it is necessary to focus on what is distinctive about markets and about market misconduct as a form of wrongdoing. This allows us to see the area as a whole and identify certain common features based on central institutional features of markets and the role that criminal law has played in protecting them – notably ensuring competition, preventing exploitation, and embedding trust. This approach, then, can be a means of raising wider questions about our understanding of the relationship between criminal law and the market in modern society – and the role that criminal law can or should play in regulating those markets.

The recent global financial crisis has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of traditional regulation in averting financial crime. Consequently the supervision of financial institutions has been increasingly re-evaluated and such endeavours have resulted in the reregulation of the sector in many jurisdictions. This article argues that, much as these strategies can be said to be laudable, until they emphasize engagement with the people who work in those institutions through making it possible for them to report corporate misconduct, these legislative paradigms will not avail much. As such, this article argues for the increased use of insiders through whistleblowing as a mechanism to support the exposure of illegal activities. By comparing the whistleblowing approaches adopted in South Africa and Switzerland, this article attempts to contribute to the standardization of approaches that can be used to enhance global financial sector transparency and minimize financial crime.

Despite the ubiquity of illegality in today’s financial markets and the questions this raises with regard to the social legitimacy of today’s financial industry, systematic scrutiny of the phenomenon of financial crime is lacking in the field of sociology. One field of research in which the illegal dimensions of capitalist dynamics have long taken center stage is the field of white-collar crime research. This article makes available to economic sociologists an overview of the most important conceptual insights generated in the white-collar crime literature. In doing so, its aim is to provide economic sociologists with some orientation for future research on financial crime. Building on the insights generated in wcc literature, the article concludes by suggesting a number of promising avenues for future sociological research on the phenomenon of illegality in financial markets.