WCC Definition

The Roots and Variant Definitions of the Concept of “White-Collar Crime”
The Roots and Variant Definitions of the Concept of

“White-Collar Crime”
Gilbert Geis
The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime
Edited by Shanna R. Van Slyke, Michael L. Benson, and Francis T. Cullen
Print Publication Date: May 2016

Subject: Criminology and Criminal Justice, Organizational and White-Collar Crime
Online Publication Date: Apr 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199925513.013.2
Abstract and Keywords
White-collar crime was traditionally a subject that was confined to the shadows. However,
the economic meltdown of 2008–2009 focused increasing criminological attention on
white-collar crime. This chapter examines historically the social science trajectory of the
concept of white-collar crime. The chapter explains the debate regarding definitions that
concentrate on the status of offenders versus those that focus on the legal standing of the
behavior as the key element of white-collar crime. The early definition of white-collar
crime was an offense committed by a person of high position in the course of his or her
occupation. The chapter concludes by arguing that this definition has more potential for
focusing attention on malevolent behaviors that in contemporary times reflect power that
is inequitably distributed and poorly regulated. Because of this inequality, the dishonest
in the upper echelons are able to ruthlessly exploit the remainder of the citizenry without
facing serious consequences.
Keywords: meltdown, offenders, power, regulation, white-collar crime
WHITE-COLLAR crime has become a prominent social and political issue since the global
economic meltdown that began in the first decade of the present century. This essay dis
cusses the history of concern with such behavior while focusing on the various definitions
of what should be regarded by the criminal justice and regulatory systems as white-collar
crime.
The core conclusions are as follows:
• Throughout history there has been social and political concern regarding the abuse
of power by elites in business, politics, and the professions, and persons who exploit
the citizenry by violations of customs, rules, and laws.
• Disapproval of these malevolent practices began to coalesce in the United States at
the turn of the 20th century in the movement against persons labeled “robber barons”
and in the work of a group of writers who were called muckrakers.
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• This movement was specified as a crusade against “criminaloids” and “white-collar

bandits” before the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 pinned the tag of “white-col
lar crime” on the illegal acts of the powerful in the course of their occupational work.
• Sutherland’s definition has been challenged by people who insist that it should not
be the status of the perpetrator but conviction for criminal acts with specific charac
teristics, such as securities fraud, that should define white-collar crime.
• Dissensus over the relative merits of offender-based and offense-based definitions of
white-collar crime can be transcended in part by use of a hybrid approach that avoids
some of the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the latter.
Section I of this essay offers an inventory of behaviors in early times that would to
(p. 26)
day come under the heading of white-collar crime. Section II reviews writings in the Unit
ed States prior to the formal introduction of the term “white-collar crime.” Section III
reviews the emergence of the designation “white-collar crime” and the erratic nature of
the definitions offered by its originator. Section IV discusses the appearance of an empha
sis on the legal nature of the offense rather than the status of the offender, and notes the
significance of the two major approaches to white-collar crime for research, theory, and
policy. Finally, section V offers the writer’s appraisal of the variant definitions of “white-
collar crime.”
I. The Pre-Sutherland Landscape

The belief that all humans are born equal is dear to the heart of many citizens of democ
racies, but throughout time it has been refuted by the fact that some persons, through
birth, effort, good luck, or other arrangements, are a great deal more equal than others.
The power that goes with being better situated in the social and economic hierarchy may
be used to engage in actions that violate tradition and, as social systems evolve, formal le
gal rules. Early substantive information on elite wrongdoing can be gleaned from codes
promulgated almost two thousand years before the beginning of the Christian calendar.
Notable is the Code of Hammurabi, issued about 1780 B.C.E. by the ruler of Babylonia
(Prince 1904; Bryant 2005). Among its 282 provisions are decrees proclaiming that “a
judge who has given a verdict, rendered a decision, granted a written judgment, and af
terward had altered his judgment” was to be fined twelve times the amount of the judg
ment and expelled from his position (Johns 1999). Presumably, the rules were intended to
discourage payment of bribes to judges to induce them to change their verdict.
The ancient records also include other examples. Edicts, parables, imprecations, and
curses directed at practices that later became known as white-collar crimes appear in the
history of the offense of bribery in ancient Egypt (Taylor 2001) and political tyranny in
early Greece (McGlew 1993). Corruption in the Roman Empire was classically portrayed
by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar when Brutus levels the accusation: “Let me tell you, Cas
sius, you yourself/Are much condemned to have an itching palm/To sell and mart your of
fices for gold.” (An itching palm, folklore claimed, could best be cured by scratching it
with a metallic coin.) In Exodus 23:8 in the King James translation of the Old Testament,
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we again are met with a warning against bribery: “And you shall take no bribes, for the
bribe blinds the wise, and perverts the words of the righteous.” In Matthew 21:12, there
is the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the unscrupulous money changers in the
temple.
In the common law of England, as well as in colonial American statutes, there were provi
sions against what were called forestalling, engrossing, and regrating—offenses (p. 27) in
volving the creation of shortages of comestibles in order to reap greater profits for food
deliberately withheld from the market (Geis 1988, pp. 9–13).
Harsh indictments of the kinds of behavior that would be labeled “white-collar crime”
likewise appear in the more contemporary historical record. Perhaps (but perhaps not)
the most influential prompt to interest in white-collar crime came from the work of
Charles Richmond Henderson, Sutherland’s Ph.D. advisor at the University of Chicago.
Henderson had written in a textbook:
The social classes of the highest culture furnish few convicts, yet there are educat
ed criminals. Advanced culture modifies the form of crime, tends to make it less
coarse and violent, but more cunning; restricts it to quasi-legal forms. But educa
tion also opens up the way to new and colossal kinds of crime. . . . Many of the
“Napoleons” of trade . . . are cold-blooded robbers and murderers, utterly indiffer
ent to the inevitable misery which . . . will follow their contrivances and deals.
(Henderson 1901, p. 250)
In 1907, E. A. Ross, a preeminent sociologist, devoted a chapter in his Sin and Society to
persons he labeled criminaloids. His roster included
the director who speculates in securities, the banker who lends the depositors’
money to himself . . . the railroad official who grants a secret rebate for his private
graft, the builder who hires delegates to harass his rivals with ceaseless strikes,
the labor leader who instigates a strike in order to be paid for calling it off, the
publisher who bribes his text-books into the schools. (p. 50)
The criminaloid, Ross went on, “counterfeits the good citizen. Full well he knows that the
giving of a fountain or a park, the establishing of a college chair on Neolithic drama or
the elegiac poetry of the Chaldeans will more than outweigh the dodging of taxes, the
grabbing of streets, and the corrupting of city councils” (p. 62).
The investigative work of the muckrakers—Ida Tarbell, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair,
among others—documented harmful practices in the oil industry, the Chicago meatpack
ing plants, as well as corruption in the country’s largest cities (Filler 1990). The term
“robber barons” was fixed by Matthew Josephson (1933) on magnates who had engaged
in self-serving financial craftiness, sucking funds from investors and the government,
money that, for example, only marginally went into the building of the transcontinental
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railroads but largely ended up in the pockets of moguls such as Leland Stanford and
Mark Hopkins (Lewis 1938; see generally Geis 2011, pp. 15–82).
Other writers also noted elite wrongdoing and likened the perpetrators to “white-collar
bandits” (Schoepfer and Tibbetts 2011). In 1926, Hurnard J. Kenner, the manager of the
Better Business Bureau, berated “the white-collar bandit, the gentleman thief who steals
the savings of the uniformed or gullible by stock-swindling and fraudulent brokerage
practices” (Kenner 1926, p. 54). Three years later, the same term was employed by
George E. Q. Johnson, Jr. (1929), a federal district attorney in Illinois. (p. 28) Finally, a law
professor, writing about planned bankruptcies, attributed them to “white-collar
bandits” (Wolfe 1938).
II. Edwin H. Sutherland

The term “white-collar crime” was introduced to the public arena by Edwin H. Sutherland
in his 1939 presidential address to a joint meeting of the American Sociological Society
and the American Economics Association. Sutherland had graduated in 1904 from Grand
Island College in Nebraska, where his father, a Baptist minister, was president. He en
rolled in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, staffed by what many
people consider the most eminent group of sociology scholars ever assembled in one aca
demic setting (Bulmer 1984).
There are no obvious clues that might explain Sutherland’s emergent focus on white-col
lar crime in the latter part of his career. Notably, however, he was raised in Nebraska and
absorbed the populist ideology that saw corporate leaders, particularly those running the
railroads, mercilessly sucking the lifeblood out of farm communities by levying exorbitant
and discriminatory rates (Cherry 1981). In the preface to his 1949 monograph on the sub
ject he noted that he (in fact, primarily his students) had been assembling the material for
the book during the previous twenty-five years. Eventually, he would publish this mono
graph and four papers on the subject of white-collar crime. In addition, the text of a talk
on white-collar crime that Sutherland delivered at DePauw University was included in a
collection of his journal writings.
A. “White-Collar Criminality” (1939)
A major theme of Sutherland’s presidential address was that, in their research and theo
ries, both sociologists and economists had failed to take account of what he labeled
“white-collar crime.” Had they attended to such crimes, inevitably they would have real
ized that notions that crime was caused by conditions such as poverty, broken homes,
psychopathic ailments, immigrant status, and mental deficiency were inadequate. The
reason, Sutherland argued, is that they failed to account for illegal acts by the powerful in
their role in business, politics, and the professions.
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Sutherland provided the first two of his various definitions of white-collar crime in his ad
dress. His aim, he proclaimed, was “a comparison of crime in the upper or white-collar
class, composed of respectable or at least respected business and professional men, and
crime in the lower class, composed of persons of low socio-economic status” (Sutherland
1940, p. 1). In a later footnote he elaborated on his definition:
Perhaps it should be repeated that “white-collar” (upper) and “lower” classes

merely designate persons of high and low socioeconomic status. Income and
amount of (p. 29) money involved in the crime are not the sole criteria. Many per
sons of “low” socioeconomic status are “white-collar” criminals in the sense that
they are well-dressed, well-educated, and have high incomes, but “white-collar” as
used in this paper means “respected,” “socially accepted and approved,” “looked
up to.” Some people in this class may not be well-dressed or well-educated, nor
have high incomes, although the “upper” usually exceed the “lower” classes in
these respects as well as in social status. (p. 4)
This piece of obscurantism indicates the inconclusive wrestling bout that Sutherland had
with himself trying to pin down the parameters of his subject.
Sutherland clearly was following the path of the muckrakers, as a newspaper reporter
had no trouble recognizing. The story in the Philadelphia Public-Ledger (1939, p. 17) indi
cated that his speech offered a “withering denunciation” of acts of white-collar crime to
“an astonished audience.” In his talk, Sutherland harked back to the robber barons—Cor
nelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and others—to make his case. He also added to that roster
more current upper-crust crooks—Ivar Kreuger and Serge Alexandre Stavisky—and main
tained that “in many periods more important crime news may be found on the financial
pages of newspapers than on the front pages” (p. 2).
Sutherland insisted that the behaviors he was concerned with could have been handled as
criminal offenses. He offered a roster of agencies that might move against white-collar of
fenders (e.g., the Interstate Commerce Commission) and acts that might be committed by
white-collar offenders (e.g., false advertising). “White-collar crime is real crime,” he
claimed. “It is not ordinarily called crime, and calling it by this name does not make it
worse, just as not calling it crime does not make it better” (p. 5). He was concerned not
with criminal convictions but with “convict-ability” (p. 6). Sutherland argued that whether
an act is defined as a crime or a violation often is determined by the power of likely of
fenders. An example others would offer is lobbying, which is self-evidently a form of
bribery, except that the politicians who are lobbied are the ones who determine the legal
dimensions of bribery.
Sutherland believed there was need for a theory that explained every kind of crime. For
him, the etiological grail was “differential association,” a set of postulates maintaining
that criminal behavior is learned and that the essence of the learning involves an ac
quired understanding of outlawed behavior as acceptable or unacceptable and acting in
accord with that belief. Sutherland, who often was his own most astute critic, would
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hedge that position in the textbook that he wrote and that Donald Cressey, a former
Sutherland Ph.D. student, updated after Sutherland’s death:
Just as the germ theory of disease does not explain all diseases, so it is possible
that no one theory of criminal behavior will explain all criminal behavior. In that
case, it will be desirable to define the areas in which any theory applies, so that
the several theories can coordinate and, when taken together, can explain all crim
inal behavior.
(Sutherland and Cressey 1960, p. 71; Sutherland 1948)
(p. 30) B. Published Papers, Lectures, and Controversy (1941–1949)
Less than a year after his presidential address Sutherland published an article that re
peated many of his earlier points but also sought to clarify the foggy impression he had
left regarding the behaviors with which he was concerned. He granted that his definition
of white-collar crime was “arbitrary and not very precise” (Sutherland 1941, p. 11) and
then offered a pair of examples of what he deemed white-collar crime to be: “[A] fraud
committed by a realtor in the sale of a house,” Sutherland wrote, “or a murder committed
by a manufacturer in strike-breaking activity” (p. 11). He subsequently offered a laundry
list of misrepresentations that he believed fell under his definition of white-collar crime:
[M]isrepresentations occur in the financial statements of corporations, in advertis

ing and other sales methods, in manipulation of the stock exchange, in short
weights and measures and in the misgrading of commodities, in embezzlement
and misapplication of funds, in commercial bribery, in the bribery of public offi
cials, in tax frauds, and in the misapplication of funds in receiverships and bank
ruptcies. (p. 11)
Six years following his presidential address, Sutherland published a stalwart defense of
the fact that he classified as crimes episodes that had not been dealt with by a criminal
court (Sutherland 1945). Importantly, he had moved his attention from delicts of individu
als to organizational offenses. He had examined 547 adverse decisions for violations of
one of four federal statutes: antitrust, false advertising, offenses against the National La
bor Relations Act, and infringement of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Only 9 per
cent of these events had been tried as crimes; the large majority had been dealt with in
equity or civil courts or by quasi-judicial commissions. Sutherland argued that 473 of the
cases were crimes and could have been proceeded against as such if the authorities had
chosen to do so. That they had not done so, he believed, was often the result of social ho
mogeneity between the offenders and the enforcers, the political contributions that busi
nesses make to officeholders and office-seekers, and a relatively indifferent public opin
ion. He also maintained that the cases showed that “the criminality of [the corporate] be
havior was not made obvious by the conventional procedures of the criminal law but was
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blurred and concealed by special procedures … that eliminate or at least minimize the
stigma of crime” (p. 136).
Sutherland granted that those penalized by fines, injunctions, and cease-and-desist or
ders had not enjoyed the presumption of innocence nor had the state had to prove crimi
nal intent. But he argued (rather unpersuasively) that these guarantees were disappear
ing in the criminal law as strict liability principles gained a foothold in regard to crimes
such as statutory rape and defrauding an innkeeper.
Sutherland’s (1948) talk to the Toynbee Club, a group of sociology students and faculty at
DePauw University, was a prelude to his monograph on white-collar crime that (p. 31) was
published the following year. In this informal setting, he apparently felt freer to express
his vitriolic distaste for law-breaking corporations, a category that his research indicated
included virtually every large business in the United States. His depiction of the response
of strikebreakers hired by the Ford Motor Company is tough prose for a “neutral” social
scientist:
The [strike] organizers . . . went with their literature up onto an overhead pass.
They were informed that they were trespassing on private property. According to
many witnesses, they turned quietly and started away. As they were leaving, they
were attacked. They were beaten, knocked down, and kicked. Witnesses described
this as a “terrific beating” and “unbelievably brutal.” One man’s back was broken
and another’s skull fractured. . . . While these assaults were being committed, city
policemen were present and did not interfere. [Ford’s] Director of the Service De
partment was also present. (pp. 87–88)
Sutherland maintained that “if the word ‘subversive’ refers to efforts to make changes in
the social system; the business leaders are the most subversive influence in the United
States” (p. 92). He summed up his presentation by noting: “I have attempted to demon
strate that businessmen violate the law with great frequency, using what may be called
the methods of organized crime” (p. 96).
Sutherland stated in the 1939 talk (and later in his book) that he was employing the term
“white-collar criminal” “to refer to a person in the upper socioeconomic class who vio
lates the laws designed to regulate his business.” He added that the term “white-collar”
more generally referred to “the wage-earning class which wears good clothes at work,
such as clerks in stores” (p. 79). He would omit this last observation in his book.
In an encyclopedia entry (Sutherland 1949b), Sutherland’s first sentence offered a

straightforward definition of his subject: “The white collar criminal is defined as a person
of high socioeconomic status who violates the laws designed to regulate his occupational
activities” (Sutherland 1949b, p. 511). He then proceeded, as usual, to muddy the seman
tic waters by ruminating about what was and what was not white-collar crime.
He eliminated matters such as adultery by persons of high socioeconomic standing from

the white-collar crime category, but he specifically differentiated the person of lower so
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cioeconomic status “who violates the … special trade regulations which apply to him”
from the ranks of white-collar criminals (p. 511). Sutherland had no strong interest in pin
ning down the parameters of white-collar crime, and his neglect left the class emphasis
that obviously was of special importance to him vulnerable to later attack.
C. White Collar Crime (1949)
Sutherland’s classic monograph on white-collar crime contributed very little beyond what
he already had indicated in his previous articles and talk. The 272-page book is almost ex
clusively a compilation of violations of laws, primarily regulatory rules, (p. 32) by seventy
of the largest corporate entities in America (Sutherland 1949a). Sutherland presented in
formation on violations by businesses under six different headings: (1) restraint of trade;
(2) rebates; (3) patents, trademarks, and copyrights; (4) misrepresentation in advertising;
(5) unfair labor practices; (6) war crimes; and (7) miscellaneous crimes. In regard to ad
vertising, for instance, Sutherland noted a considerable roster of blatant deceptions—that
footwear advertised as alligator shoes had no trace of alligator in them and that coffins
claimed to be rustproof were not.
His findings led Sutherland to the hyperbolic observation that in terms of their records
businesses were no different than organized criminals, an argument that takes up an en
tire chapter. He quotes with approval economist Thorstein Veblen’s observation that the
“ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent in his unscrupulous conversion of goods
and persons to his own ends and in a callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of oth
ers and of the remoter effects of his actions” (Veblen 1912, p. 237). In Sutherland’s view
this made the “ideal” (perhaps but not assuredly meaning the typical) businessperson lit
tle different than a professional criminal (p. 217).
At the end of White Collar Crime Sutherland inserted a section called “Personal Docu
ments,” which was made up of submissions by students of their experiences working in
enterprises such as selling typewriters, sewing machines, and shoes by employing
crooked tactics (1949a, p. 234ff). Sutherland might have been including these vignettes
to add a bit of further color to his monograph or perhaps merely to extend it to a more
usual length, but the tactic only serves to confound further an understanding of what
Sutherland truly regarded as white-collar crime.
Finally, under pressure from his publisher, who feared that it might end up in legal diffi
culty if companies labeled as criminal in the book but not so designated by a criminal
court sued for defamation, Sutherland cut several chapters and removed identifying cor
porate names from the text. It would be thirty-four years before the unabridged version
found its way into print (Sutherland 1983).
D. Nota Bene
My review of Sutherland’s publications and his speech on white-collar crime lead to a

conclusion that white-collar crime scholars, myself included, have largely ignored. It is
that Sutherland never really studied white-collar crime by individuals but almost exclu
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sively focused on business, usually corporate, wrongdoing. He buttressed his introduction

of the term “white-collar crime” in 1939 with scattered references to particular notorious
offenders and offered a smattering of observations (e.g., white-collar criminals are re
sponsible for more financial losses than the entire traditional street offenders combined).
But he must have come to realize that he did not possess the resources, nor could he lo
cate the sources, to carry out the very demanding task of providing substantive informa
tion and theoretical conclusions about the cohort of persons he regarded as white-collar
criminals. What could he say that would advance our understanding (p. 33) of people like
John D. Rockefeller and Daniel Drew that would rise very far above the anecdotal?
III. Critiques and Alternatives

Sutherland, and probably all who prefer offender-based definitions of white-collar crime
over definitions grounded in crime characteristics, refused to forfeit social scientific defi
nitional autonomy to the lawmakers and enforcers. Social scientists might make “better”
decisions than legislators in delineating what should be regarded as white-collar crimes,
since they presumably (hopefully?) have no personal nor financial interest in their deci
sions and could be held to a standard of logical consistency. Attacks on Sutherland’s defi
nition were launched by legal scholars as well as by some prominent social scientists who
participated in a Yale Law School study of white-collar crime.
A. Conviction by a Criminal Court
Sutherland’s heresy in defining white-collar crime, according to some lawyers, was in cat
egorizing as white-collar crime acts that the authorities had not treated as crimes. Thus,
Tappan claimed that Sutherland’s concept of white-collar crime had created a “wide
spread and seductive … fashionable dogma” (1947, p. 98). Tappan faulted the study of
white-collar crime for being marked by “blustering broadsides” against the “existing
system” (p. 99). He noted that “[a]ll of these practices are within the framework of ordi
nary business practices” (p. 99), as if this means that they should be acceptable. Presum
ably, Sutherland would have found the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guilty
judgment as validating the behavior as a white-collar crime.
In contrast to Sutherland’s definitional approach, Tappan (1947) repeatedly argued that

the only reasonable subject for criminological concern was the person who had been con
victed in a criminal court. “Only those are criminals who have been adjudicated as such
by the courts,” he insisted (p. 100), and added: “In studying the offender there can be no
presumption that arrested, arraigned, indicated, or prosecuted persons are criminals un
less they also be held guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of a particular offense” (p. 100).
But this critique of Sutherland is flawed. How do we classify Kenneth Lay, the onetime
president of Enron, who was convicted of multiple white-collar offenses but the record
was wiped clean when he died before he could be sentenced (Eichenwald 2008)? Or Ivar
Kreuger and other obvious white-collar criminals who killed themselves before they could
be tried (Partnoy 2009)? While Tappan identified Sutherland’s work by name, he failed to
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address its core point: white-collar crimes are acts that are dealt with by government
agencies and that they could have been prosecuted in a criminal court had the authorities
chosen to do so. Tappan’s definition of the (p. 34) white-collar criminal is little more than
a historical footnote today, and there are no contemporary advocates for it.
B. Crimes with Distinctive Characteristics
Unlike the earlier law-trained critics of Sutherland’s delineation of white-collar crime,

Herbert Edelhertz had led fraud investigations as chief of the fraud division of the U.S.
Department of Justice. Edelhertz believed that Sutherland’s definition was much too limit
ed. White-collar crime was “democratic,” he maintained, “and can be committed by a
bank clerk or the head of his institution” (Edelhertz 1970, pp. 3–4). This position trivial
ized Sutherland’s concern with the abuse of power by the powerful. Edelhertz saw white-
collar crime as “an illegal act or a series of illegal acts committed by nonphysical means
and by concealment or guile, to obtain money or property, to avoid the payment or loss of
money or property, or to obtain business or personal advantage” (p. 4).
Edelhertz’s core point was that the definition of white-collar crime ought to be tied direct
ly to legal provisions, which reflect the characteristics of these crimes. The definition that
he offered, however, has a number of questionable criteria. It is odd to specify one act or
a series of acts since a single offense will do to meet the requirements of the definition. In
addition, it could be argued that a reasonable categorization of white-collar offenses
should include violent acts, such as when a doctor does cataract operations on patients
who do not require the procedure and inflicts eyesight loss (Jesilow, Pontell, and Geis
1993). The focus on motive, which need not be proven in a criminal case, seems unneces
sary. Nor is it clear if Edelhertz agreed with Sutherland or with Tappan regarding
whether a criminal conviction was necessary for an act to be considered a white-collar
crime.
Another legal definition of their subject based on crime characteristics marked the work
of a group of scholars at Yale University. The Yale group decided to focus on eight federal
statutes to provide a sample of white-collar criminals: (1) securities fraud; (2) antitrust vi
olations; (3) bribery; (4) tax offenses; (5) bank embezzlement; (6) postal and wire fraud;
(7) false claims and statements; and (8) credit- and lending-institution fraud. Their study
sites were seven federal district courts. They examined a random sample of thirty persons
convicted in each of the courts during the fiscal years 1976 through 1978 for offenses.
Researchers were provided access to the presentence investigation reports prepared by
probation officers, which typically contained detailed information about both the offender
and the offense.
For white-collar crime scholars the flagship of the work at Yale was Crimes of the Middle
Classes (Weisburd et al. 1991). While elites and the unemployed appeared in their sample
of 1094 offenders, they concluded that in the main white-collar crime, as they defined it,
was essentially the conduct of middle-class persons. Kathleen Daly, a member of the re
search team, would later state that the women in the study were characterized by “occu
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pational marginality.” As many as one third of the women in some of the offense cate
gories were unemployed. Daly wondered if “white-collar criminal” was an appropriate
designation for the women, given their “socioeconomic profile, coupled with the nature of
their crimes” (Daly 1989, p. 790).
In ignoring corporate and civil offenses, the Yale investigators failed to attend to
(p. 35)
executives who were culpable but who escaped criminal prosecution because the govern
ment preferred to fine them or to act against the deeper-pocketed organizations for
which they worked. Similarly and arguably the Yale Study was off-target by ignoring regu
latory actions. The criminal law was only rarely invoked after the recent economic melt
down, although many prominent businessmen, such as Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide,
were heavily fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission: his fine was $67.5 million
(Madrick 2011). The offense roster used by Yale would also overlook persons such as
Martha Stewart, who had seemingly violated the law against insider trading but was con
victed on a charge of perjury (Heminway 2007).
In defense of defining white-collar crime on the basis of offense characteristics, Susan

Shapiro, a participant in the Yale Study, maintained that there was a need to “liberate”
the term from its Sutherland shackles, especially its focus on the wardrobe of the perpe
trator. The designation “white-collar criminal,” she argued, should be confined to viola
tors of trust, such as persons who manipulate norms of disclosure, disinterest, and role
competence, categories, Shapiro granted, that would not embrace antitrust violations.
Shapiro defended her revisionist position with rousing rhetoric, claiming that
Sutherland’s approach to white-collar crime had “created an imprisoning framework for
contemporary scholarship, impoverishing theory, distorting empirical inquiry, oversimpli
fying policy analysis, inflating our muckraking instincts, and obscuring fascinating ques
tions about the relationship between social organization and crime” (Shapiro 1990, p.
346).
IV. Envoi
I have neither need nor predilection to be neutral on the matters discussed above, to
cheer on with equal enthusiasm both my spouse and the bear. For my part, however in
eptly Sutherland formulated his definition and however poorly he defended it, its essen
tial focus on the abuse of power by elites in the course of their occupation stands out as
an exceedingly important public policy issue that demands the keen attention of the pub
lic, policymakers, and research scholars.
A good starting point is the post-Sutherland definition of white-collar crime as “violations

of the law to which penalties are attached that involve the use of the violator’s position of
significant power, influence or trust in the legitimate economic or political institutional
order for the purpose of illegal gain, or to commit an illegal act for personal or organiza
tional gain” (Reiss and Biderman 1980, p. 4). There are two major virtues of this defini
tion. First, it sets out in a straightforward manner the essence of Sutherland’s basic focus
on the use of significant power, influence, and trust in violation of the law by persons
Page 11 of 16

holding legitimate positions. Recent high-profile white-collar crimes include the savings
and loan bank debacles (Calavita, Pontell, and Tillman 1997). Then there were Enron and
Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Adelphia Communications, and other big-time perpetrators
of financial crookedness (see, e.g., Swartz and Watkins 2003; Cooper 2008). Finally, and
most dramatically, the world suffered from the subprime (p. 36) mortgage and hedge fund
manipulations that brought about the great economic meltdown. Companies involved in
cluded Bear Stearns, the American International Group, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide Fi
nancial, and the Bank of America (Morris 2008; Geis 2012). The meltdown pinpointed be
havior that is criminologically distinctive and of great public concern and should not be
diluted by being associated with matters such as insufficient-funds checks that unem
ployed persons seek to pass.
Second, the Reiss–Biderman definition embraces serious law violations that are not nec
essarily dealt with in criminal courts. In the wake of the meltdown the failure of the gov
ernment to seek criminal indictments was notorious. The U.S. Department of Justice al
legedly brokered an agreement with state attorneys general not to file cases in criminal
courts because the resultant dramatic public exposure of what had gone on would only
further undermine a fragile financial world (Morgenson and Story 2012).
V. Conclusions
Disagreement over the variant definitions of white-collar crime has been identified as a
conflict of Populist (in terms of the elite standing of the perpetrator) and Patrician per
spectives (focusing on violators of specified laws). In a pair of articles, Neal Shover and
Francis Cullen contrasted the ingredients of the Sutherland definition of white-collar
crime and definitions that are based on crime characteristics rather than the status of the
offender (Shover and Cullen 2008, 2011).
Sutherland’s position was labeled a “Populist” approach and said to be based on a call for
equal justice, while the Yale definition, labeled Patrician, was held to be “more narrow,
technical and less reform-oriented” (2008, p. 156). The Patrician view was said to “lump
together … frauds committed by itinerant door-to-door vinyl siding installers and the
crimes of international bankers” (2011, p. 50). The result is that “unusually privileged of
fenders thereby blend with and become less conspicuous among their more numerous
middle-class cousins” (2011, p. 50). Neither did partisans of the Patrician approach “gen
erally include inequality as a causal factor” (2008, p. 157). Adherence to the Patrician de
finition, Shover and Cullen pointed out, allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to arrest
thieves and telemarketing fraudsters and broadcast to the public that it was focusing its
energies on capturing white-collar criminals.
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The Roots and Variant Definitions of the Concept of “White-Collar Crime”

The Roots and Variant Definitions of the Concept of

Print Publication Date: May 2016

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: meltdown, offenders, power, regulation, white-collar crime

The core conclusions are as follows:

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

• This movement was specified as a crusade against “criminaloids” and “white-collar

I. The Pre-Sutherland Landscape

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

(Henderson 1901, p. 250)

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

II. Edwin H. Sutherland

A. “White-Collar Criminality” (1939)

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Perhaps it should be repeated that “white-collar” (upper) and “lower” classes

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

(Sutherland and Cressey 1960, p. 71; Sutherland 1948)

(p. 30) B. Published Papers, Lectures, and Controversy (1941–1949)

[M]isrepresentations occur in the financial statements of corporations, in advertis­

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

In an encyclopedia entry (Sutherland 1949b), Sutherland’s first sentence offered a

He eliminated matters such as adultery by persons of high socioeconomic standing from

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

C. White Collar Crime (1949)

My review of Sutherland’s publications and his speech on white-collar crime lead to a

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

sively focused on business, usually corporate, wrongdoing. He buttressed his introduction

III. Critiques and Alternatives

A. Conviction by a Criminal Court

In contrast to Sutherland’s definitional approach, Tappan (1947) repeatedly argued that

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

B. Crimes with Distinctive Characteristics

Unlike the earlier law-trained critics of Sutherland’s delineation of white-collar crime,

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

In defense of defining white-collar crime on the basis of offense characteristics, Susan

A good starting point is the post-Sutherland definition of white-collar crime as “violations

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Cherry, Robert W. 1981. Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Ne­

braska Politics, 1895–1915. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Cooper, Cynthia. 2008. Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journal of a Corporate Whistle-

Geis, Gilbert. 1988. “From Deuteronomy to Deniability: A Historical Perlustration on

Henderson, Charles R. 1901. Introduction to the Study of Dependent, Defective, and

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Prince, J. Dynley. 1904. “Code of Hammurabi.” American Journal of Theology 8: 601–09.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Sutherland, Edwin H. 1940. “White-Collar Criminality.” American Sociological Review 5:

Sutherland, Edwin H. 1948. “Crime of Corporations.” In Edwin H. Sutherland on Analyz­

Sutherland, Edwin H. 1949a. White Collar Crime. New York: Dryden.

Sutherland, Edwin H. 1949b. “The White Collar Criminal.” In Encyclopedia of Criminolo­

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

Subscriber: The W B National University of Juridical; date: 05 August 2019

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