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The purpose of this paper is to review the extant published literature using traditional criminological theories in an effort to explain police misconduct.

This paper reflects a narrative meta-review of through a search of several academic databases (e.g. Criminal Justice Abstracts, Criminology: A SAGE Full Text Collection, EBSCO Host and PsychInfo). Twenty-nine studies, across six theoretical perspectives, were identified and reviewed.

The extant research generally suggests that traditional criminological theory is useful in explaining misconduct.

The findings call on agencies to continually strengthen their recruiting and hiring processes to select recruits with suitable characteristics, and to improve their early warning systems to detect officers with patterns of problematic behavior. Also, the findings call for multiple avenues of future scholarship, namely, in theory development/integration and in refining the measurement of police misconduct.

This paper will be useful for researchers who wish to further explore the etiology of misconduct, and for police administrators who wish to reduce the prevalence of such behavior.

This paper aims to examine academic dishonesty and research misconduct, two forms of academic fraud, and provides suggestions for future research informed by criminological theory.

After reviewing prior literature, this paper outlines four general criminological theories that can explain academic fraud.

While criminological theory has been applied to some studies of academic dishonesty, research misconduct has rarely been examined within a broader theoretical context.

This paper provides a blueprint for future theoretically informed analyses of academic fraud.

This paper represents a unique attempt to apply general criminological theories to diverse forms of fraud in higher education settings.

Economic crime is too varied an activity to be explained by a single theory. Valuable insights are gained from theories that focus on individual characteristics and on the socio‐economic context of crime, but these theories are not sufficient explanations of economically motivated crime. They are usefully supplemented by legal responsiveness theory, which focuses on the capacity of the economic system to provide legal means to adapt to economic change. This theory acknowledges the insights of chaos and cellular automata theory into the inevitable and unpredictable nature of economic change. Variation in the system's capacity for legal responsiveness to unpredicted change is hypothesized to have an impact on crime. Economic crime can be an indication of dysfunction in the adaptation systems of the economy. The concepts of ecological and evolutionary economics such as stability, resilience, connectedness and adaptation offer an approach to analyzing the systemic property of legal responsiveness.