ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses fiddles in the workplace, the ordinary crimes of ordinary people in ordinary jobs. It discusses where to look for fiddles and how to recognize them, how formally designed work systems are adapted, used, manipulated and bent, and why this is frequently done with the collusion of managements. It is argues that, in these endeavours, it is first necessary to suspend one's own morality in order to gain objective assessments of these behaviours. Changes in technology have an evident impact on industrial relations, so that it becomes almost platitudinous to note how computers have radically affected workplace relations and inevitably workplace deviance. Ditton and Henry and Mars had earlier shown that understanding occupational deviance involved recognizing that its criminal aspects were of a different order from 'ordinary' crime and that blurring their differences negated understanding. Henry was later to set occupational crime within the wider context of the informal and formal economies.
