White-collar crime
White-collar crime has become the ‘lingua franca’ for encapsulating many of the economic crimes that will be considered in this book. It is not a legal term for a specific offence: a person cannot be charged with white-collar crime. Rather, it is a social science concept originally coined by Edwin Sutherland, a prominent American criminologist:
Sutherland (1940) devised the phrase to represent a group, or typology, of offending behaviours that share common offender and contextual characteristics:
- White-collar criminals are respectable offenders.
- Their offences involve an abuse of trust.
- Their criminal activities are integrated into their professional work routines.
Sutherland sought to bring attention to the hidden financial crimes and immoral practices of corporations and the professional elite, including fraud, bribery, false advertising, price-fixing and intellectual property crime. In doing so, he exposed the stark contrast in attitudes towards white-collar crimes and the physical ‘street’ crimes of violence, vandalism and theft. He noticed how policymakers, criminal enforcement agencies and academics paid scant regard to the very substantial crimes of the wealthy, preferring to focus their efforts on the far more modest crimes of the disadvantaged. He argued with some passion that the immunity of white-collar criminals to prosecution is due to class bias in the courts and the power of the privileged class to influence the administration of the law (Sutherland, 1940). This led to his central conclusion that the propensity to commit crime is essentially the same in the upper and lower classes, but the types of crimes differ due to opportunity.
Edwin Sutherland’s original concept was not just concerned with financial crimes. It also encompassed financially motivated physical crimes, such as labour abuses, health and safety violations, environmental harms and even financially motivated war crimes (Friedrichs, 2002, 2010; Sutherland, 1945, 1983). Sutherland used the crime label loosely so as to include non-criminal wrongdoing, which was typically handled by regulatory authorities or litigated through the civil courts, but which he believed should be regarded as criminal and prosecuted as crimes.
Debates about the definition and scope of white-collar crime have continued since Sutherland coined the term (Geis, 2016). Arguments and definitions have emerged that either narrow or expand its typological scope. Some maintain a purely legalistic view, that the term white-collar crime should only be applied to acts which have been prosecuted and proven in criminal courts (Tappan, 1947). Others have a completely contrary view, claiming that the acts are matters for regulators, not the criminal courts (Dinitz, 1977). Shapiro (1990) argues that the concept’s narrow focus on the offender, the respectable professional, hinders our understanding of the offence. Shapiro called for the concept to be liberated from the constraints of the offender’s characteristics in order to focus research attention on the deviant behaviour. She maintained that the defining characteristic of white-collar crime is the abuse of trust element of Sutherland’s concept (ibid.).
Later academics followed Shapiro’s call to focus on the offence and expanded the scope of white-collar crime to include ‘blue collar’ and non-occupational offenders who commit fraud (Weisburd et al., 1994, 2001). From a feminist criminology perspective, Daly (1989) argued that Sutherland’s definition is gender biased because corporate white-collar workers are predominantly men. Daly broadened the concept to include anyone, including blue-collar workers and unemployed persons, who violate trust or commit fraud. Some commentators have criticised this downward trajectory that trivialises white-collar crime...
