White Collar Crime

Abstract

The title of Sutherland's presidential address printed in the program was “The White-Collar Criminal,” but the published version was called “White-Collar Criminality” and the subsequent monograph bore the title White Collar Crime. The shift in emphasis is significant. By the time he published the book; Sutherland largely had abandoned his focus on human malefactors and had resorted to the only approach reasonably available to him at the time by presenting case histories of violations by corporate entities. Sutherland had been employing graduate students since 1928 to locate and codify reports of corporate wrongdoing (Sutherland, 1956). But as Donald Cressey, Sutherland's intellectual acolyte, would point out, Sutherland had to anthropomorphize the corporations, that is, to treat them as if they were individuals whose actions could best be interpreted by the social psychological theory that Sutherland advocated. For Cressey, this was a feckless enterprise: only people could think and act; organizations were mindless entities. The paper discuss about the white Collar crime

White Collar Crime

Introduction

The concept of white-collar crime, introduced by Edwin H. Sutherland in his presidential address to the 34th annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in 1939, had two fundamental themes. First, it called attention to serious occupational law-breaking by upper-level persons in business, politics, and the professions. Second, it tied the portrait of such criminal activity to a theoretical construct that Sutherland, in his presidential address (published in 1940 as “White-Collar Criminality”) had labeled “differential association.”

History and Background

Sutherland's presidential address and a decade later his classic monograph White Collar Crime embedded the words white-collar crime in our language. The term appears constantly in and on the mass media, statutes employ it as a catch-all designation for certain illegal behaviors, and judges refer to it in decisions and sentencing justifications in ways that indicate a common public understanding of what is meant.

In his presidential address, Sutherland referred to notorious swindlers, many of whom, in Matthew Josephson's colorful term, were labeled “robber barons”—business tycoons who bought legislatures, robbed investors, and ran roughshod over competitors. But these wrongdoers could not be grouped and examined in a manner that would yield scientifically useful theoretical generalizations. At best, they were case histories—war stories—that had among them only some similarities that might be molded into a superficial explanatory scheme.

Scope

In promulgating his material on white-collar crime, Sutherland belittled, indeed ridiculed, ideas that served as then-current explanations of crime, including feeblemindedness, poverty, immigrant status, broken homes, and oedipal complexes. In what would become a much-quoted observation, Sutherland wrote, “We have no reason to think that General Motors has an inferiority complex or that the Aluminum Corporation of American has a frustration-aggression complex” (1956, p. 96). This polemic, however, was more a reflection of Sutherland's antipathy toward psychiatric theory that a strong debating point. To truly carry his argument, he would have had to demonstrate (or at least argue) that such pathologies could not be located in those running the corporations rather than in the businesses themselves.

Law Enforcement Strategies

A wide range of theories have been applied ...