ABSTRACT
The questions posed demonstrate that in my view it is vital to understand the social interaction process between the fraudster managers and their co-workers. My viewpoint though was not a complete tabula rasa, I needed to find a way to determine if the manager sitting in front of me wanting a locum job was in fact the person he said he was. Another recruitment manager happened to say over coffee one day that what people do in interviews is ‘impression management’ to get the job. I had no idea what impression management was, and afterwards tracked down the originator of the term, Erving Goffman, and I read his book The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life.1 I was very interested, and read his other works where he looked at different areas, like mental asylums and references to gangsters. Ironically, terms that I had used in my earlier work as a mental health professional such as stigma and labelling theory, stemmed from him. At last I had found something that had a ring of truth about it. I was intrigued and studied more about Goffman and his theory of impression management. No theory or empirical research so far has given a satisfactory understanding of how fraudsters can maintain the delusion of honesty with their colleagues. Their excessive lifestyle and greed does not seem to be noticed by anyone, let alone staff inside the organisation, and the question remains as to why and how this illusion works.
