Generally, large listed companies and banks immersed in a ‘risk and win’-culture do not have to deal with ‘deprivation of resources’ which may trigger violations of the law. The anomie-theory of Merton does not seem to fit in this context. It is more obvious that the pressure to realize lofty ambitions is the trigger for potential violations of the law. I therefore work out a ‘post-Mertonian’ anomie-concept using the ‘European Durkheim’ to examine some excessive tendencies of an originally American ‘risk and win’-culture. The aim is to work towards an anomie-theory of power illusions that makes sense in the context of corporate crime. The leading question is: which anomic attitudes prevail in an over-ambitious corporate culture and which aspirations and rationalizations can be distinguished? It is argued that an approach focused on CEO-personality traits is too limited and that the sociological approaches of Durkheim and Shover offer many points of departure to construct a plausible anomie-theory. The dimensions of that theory have been taken from studies which focus at two criminogenic norm-systems: an ‘ethos of winning at any price’ and an ‘ethos of entitlement’.

In this article, the questions why scientific misconduct has become a subject of criminological research and how scientific misconduct relates to a production-oriented academic culture are examined. It is argued that the current academic career path produces an anomic academic culture. The authors further examine the slippery notion of the term ‘scientific misconduct’ and conclude that questions about the prevalence or increase of scientific misconduct are hardly answerable. They also point at a number of undesirable side-effects of the emerging culture of distrust and control in academia, amongst which socially disengaged, highly predictable and little innovative research. They end with a plea to recapture a truly academic culture.