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White-Collar and Corporate Crime

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Levi, M. and Lord, N. (2017) ‘White-Collar and Corporate Crime’ in A. Liebling, S. Maruna and L.
McAra (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 6th Ed., Oxford: OUP

White-Collar and Corporate Crime

Michael Levi and Nicholas Lord, Oxford Handbook of Criminology 6th Ed

Introduction
This chapter has one main objective: to present a succinct overview of key debates and ideas
associated with theory, research and practice in the area of white-collar and corporate crimes. First,
we think about white-collar and corporate crimes in the 21st Century, contextualising these
phenomena and reinforcing their criminological significance, despite their analysis remaining at the
margins of mainstream discourse. Second, we revisit on-going conceptual debates, identifying
central analytical features of white-collar and corporate crimes before going on to argue in favour of
shifting attention towards understanding how white-collar crimes are organised and the conditions
that shape this over time. Third, we look at ways of explaining these behaviours, ranging from
consideration of individual propensities and rationality, through organisational context and culture,
to wider social conditions. Fourth, we analyse current policing and regulation strategies. We
conclude with a discussion of key themes in white-collar crime research and scholarship.

White-Collar and Corporate Crimes in the 21st Century: a

brief history of the present
We begin writing this chapter in the shadow of several corporate scandals where otherwise non-
criminal, legitimate business organisations and their employees have been implicated in a diverse
array of criminal and illicit activities. Volkswagen and its corporate associates committed globally
massive deliberate falsification of toxic diesel emission levels to enhance corporate sales targets and
profits, while Mitsubishi also falsified data in Japan for similar motives: this would normally be
analysed as white-collar crime, but it is also properly labelled as ‘organised crime’. In addition, car
industry political lobbyists successfully (and legally) sustained inappropriate lab-based testing to
make European emissions and fuel consumption look much better than they really were. In the
political sphere, the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016 and replaced by
others also accused of corruption, voted out of power by many Brazilian parliamentarians awaiting
trial for far more serious corruption and other offences than hers. In 2015, the Romanian Prime
Minister was forced to resign following anticorruption protests. The South African President Jacob
Zuma has been embroiled in a range of corruption allegations relating to personal enrichment and
the purchase of inappropriate aircraft for the air force, and in July 2016 was ordered by the
Constitutional Court to repay $400,000 of personal benefit in refurbishment of his home. FIFA
continues its well-merited reputation for corruption, and was until 2015 safe from criminal justice
 2

interventions. Its case is an exemplar of how, once the veil of secrecy is penetrated by arrests and/or
whistle-blowers, a mass of revelations can follow. Motivated more by national prestige than money,
systemic state-sponsored Russian athletics doping scandals led to the suspension of track and field
and some other Russians from the 2016 Rio Olympics, and all athletes from the Rio Paralympics. This
is merely a selection of recent high profile cases.

Tombs and Whyte note that, in addition to the dramatic cases that make headline news (such as the
above), corporations are responsible for wide-ranging and cumulatively substantial ‘routine,
everyday harm’ (Tombs and Whyte 2015: 37). They document this with respect to four key areas:
corporate theft and fraud (particularly in the retail financial services sector); crimes against
consumers (e.g. food unsafety); crimes against workers (workplace safety crimes); and crimes
against the environment (e.g. air pollution) (ibid.: 37−50). In addition, there is a range of ‘middle
class crimes’ in which tax and other frauds are committed by people who regard themselves as
respectable and are so regarded by others (Karstedt, 2016).

Dominant representations and constructions of the crime phenomenon often reflect common-sense
conceptions of criminality associated with the ‘street’ or ‘serious and organised’ criminal who is
characterised by an inherent propensity to offending and presented as an external threat to moral
society. Yet ‘crimes’ and misconduct by those in elite political and economic positions can de-
legitimate the system politically (Levi, 2012) and harm firms, groups and individuals both within and
outside their socio-economic class. Shifting analytical focus away from ‘crimes on the streets’ and
‘organised crime’ towards ‘crimes in the suites’ disturbs popular stereotypes about the composition
of ‘threats to society’ and attempts to represent criminality as a single type of person driven by risk
appetites and social pathology. Accounting for such a diverse range of criminal actors, acts and
responses to them – criminal, civil, and regulatory –poses a fascinating set of research questions,
including the conditions under which at least some forms of white-collar crime become or fail to
become social problems that ‘require’ the intervention of criminal justice rather than regulation
(Katz, 1980, Levi, 2009a).

What is white-collar and corporate crime?

White-collar crime is a term best viewed as a sensitising rather than a definitive concept (Blumer,
1969), and though no definition is satisfactory, the label retains its appeal. A brief analysis of
associated behaviours highlights the centrality of supposedly legitimate actors in the context of
otherwise legitimate business, institutional and market environments in undertaking inherently
harmful and exploitative behaviours. For instance, Edward A. Ross’s ‘criminaloid’ characterised the
inherent business duplicity of legitimate actors alongside a pretence of respectability and piousness,
driven by the same motivations as others (Ross, 1907: 47-50). In a more Marxist European than
populist American tradition, Bonger (1916) argued that lower and upper class offending alike are
explicable as a product of opportunities of the ‘capitalist economic production regime’. The
integration of these key themes led Edwin Sutherland to ‘approximately’ define white-collar crime as
‘a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his
occupation’ (Sutherland, 1949: 9). Sutherland’s empirical focus was on the violations of the 70
largest US corporations at that time and of elite executives within these, though much of his actual
research incorporated a diverse array of offences such as workplace theft, fraud by mechanics and
 3

deception by shoe sales persons. As Slapper and Tombs (1999: 4-5) summarise, Sutherland’s concept
demonstrated (i) that the common image of typical crimes and typical criminality (i.e. the
preoccupation with volume crimes) was inaccurate, (ii) that a reductionist criminology explaining
criminality in terms of lower-class pathology (i.e. such as general theories foregrounding strain or
social/individual pathology) was inadequate, (iii) that the scope of criminology needed to include a
wider range of criminal behaviours and the process of criminalisation (i.e. the offences of elite actors
and their integration with political processes), and (iv) that one must explain both the predatory
crimes by the wealthy against the poor and the abuses of power by the wealthy (i.e. recognise in
whose interests laws are created). However, Sutherland’s definition is clouded in various ambiguities
(see Nelken, 2012) and ‘has itself become an imprisoning framework that confuses the offender with
the offense and inadequately attends to the structural aspects of white-collar crimes’ (Pontell and
Geis, 2007: xiv).

A key issue is that ‘in using social status as a defining element of crime…it cannot then be used as an
explanatory variable because it is not allowed to vary independently of the crime’ (Benson and
Simpson, 2009: 7). Aligned with analyses foregrounding how the deficiencies inherent in
Sutherland’s definition ‘rendered white collar crime an impotent construct for theory building in
sociology’ (Braithwaite, 1985: 3), Shapiro (1990) argued that we ought to ‘collar the crime, not the
criminal’. This and a general focus on deception (Edelhertz, 1970) brings into scope many ‘blue-
collar’ occupational crimes that would otherwise fall outside Sutherland’s construct, watering down
the elite component and broadening the public policy challenges (Geis, 2016: 35; Pontell, 2016: 39),
which we suggest should be broadened further still by including Mafia-type ‘organised crime’
involvement in major bankruptcy and VAT frauds, counterfeiting, alcohol and tobacco tax
evasion/smuggling, and public corruption activities. But offender-based and offence-based
approaches can be compatible, as we can analyse how elite occupational positions and high social
esteem provide access to opportunities to commit particular white-collar offences; to possess the
knowledge, techniques, networks, locations and skills needed to carry them out; and to disarm or
even deter the potential suspicions of auditors, media, police and regulators.

Sutherland included as ‘crime’ acts sanctioned through criminal, civil and administrative proceedings
because there were more feasible alternatives to prosecution for such misconduct, a situation that
exists today, except for some jurisdictions that operate a ‘legality principle’ which obliges
prosecution whenever there is sufficient evidence to justify it (admittedly, a term of art that is
seldom reviewable by outsiders in practice). Some lawyers argued that it was too loose a criterion
(Tappan, 1947), though we note that all crime survey and victim survey data make precisely the
same assumption. Some corporations and individuals may admit to regulatory offences to reduce
hassle and time, whereas they would strongly defend and sometimes succeed against criminal
charges because of their imputation of dishonesty and the collateral consequences of conviction for
their right to bid for government contracts. However, as Aubert (1952: 266) put it:

‘For purposes of theoretical analysis it is of prime importance to develop and apply concepts which preserve
and emphasize the ambiguous nature of the white-collar crimes and not to "solve" the problem by classifying
them as either "crimes" or "not crimes." Their controversial nature is exactly what makes them so interesting
from a sociological point of view and what gives us a clue to important norm conflicts, clashing group interests,
and maybe incipient social change. One main benefit to be derived from the study of white-collar crimes
 4

springs from the opportunity which the ambivalence in the citizen, in the businessman, and among lawyers,
judges, and even criminologists offers as a barometer of structural conflicts and change-potential in the larger
social system of which they and the white-collar crimes are parts.’

Criminology, as a discipline, may be broad enough also to include arguably harmful but not criminal
behaviours (e.g. tax avoidance). Those from a more critical position may argue that we need to
transcend state definitions, but foregrounding a classification system based on ‘informed morality’
opens up the problem of who chooses the harm criteria and what is the role of intention in criminal
liability. Lobbying and political finance can influence criminalisation in law and in practice. However,
while debates over how widely to define ‘white-collar crime’ are important for scholars and activists,
they may be irrelevant to those with the task of responding to ‘it’ who require definitive offences
and frameworks within which to pursue such white-collar offenders. Hence, the importance of the
details in contested legislation in the UK such as the Fraud Act 2006 and the Bribery Act 2010, and
the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act 1989 and much other civil and
criminal legislation in the US. At times, there can be a political preference for criminalisation,
although (or to the ultra-cynical, even because) regulatory enforcement might arguably be more
efficient and effective (Beaton-Wells and Fisse, 2011; Engdahl and Larsson, 2015).

The definitions of ‘white-collar crime’ that we construct have theoretical, empirical and policy
implications (see Pontell, 2016). How we define and conceptualise our research focus shapes how
white-collar crime is represented, measured, explained, prevented, regulated and sanctioned.
Various conceptualisations have been advanced over the years, which have significant differences of
nuance: ‘corporate crime’ (Clinard and Yeager, 1980; Braithwaite, 1985; Slapper and Tombs, 1999)
and ‘occupational crime’ (Clinard and Yeager, 1980; Green, 1990); ‘organisational deviance’ (Ermann
and Lundman, 1978); ‘organisational crime’ (Schrager and Short, 1978); ‘crimes of the powerful’
(Pearce, 1976); ‘crimes of the middle classes’ (Weisburd, Wheeler and Waring, 1991); ‘crimes of
deception’ (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990); ‘crimes of the suites’ (Timmer and Eitzen, 1990); ‘crimes
of specialised access’ (Felson and Eckert, 2015); and ‘middle-class crime’ (Karstedt, 2016). There are
common analytical features across these definitions, such as the focus on unlawful acts and
omissions in the course of an occupation and/or in an organisational setting (public or private), the
foregrounding of a violation or abuse of trust characterised by some form of deception or
dishonesty, and the misuse of otherwise legitimate business or institutional procedures and
practices to conceal behaviours.

Occupational crimes are offences committed by individuals, or small groups of individuals, for
themselves in the course of their occupations, often against their employers (Clinard and Quinney,
1973; Clinard and Yeager, 1980: 18). In contrast, corporate/organisational crimes are those
committed by corporate officials acting for the corporation and by the corporation itself (Clinard and
Quinney, 1973; Clinard and Yeager, 1980: 16-18). But individuals can act for personal gain and for
the gain of the business (i.e. ‘by the firm, for the firm’ (Hartung, 1950)). Sutherland (1983: 227) and
Wang and Holtfreter (2012) stress levels of corporate recidivism.

Focusing on the organisation or corporation as an offender can create problems for criminal law
frameworks that are geared towards individual guilt and intent: a corporation or organization, as a
hollow entity, cannot have intent or guilt. Organisations are constellations of individuals who carry
our behaviours on their behalf, although it may be ambiguous whether these behaviours have clear
 5

criminal intent, are acts of negligence or involve an omission of duty, creating obstacles to
investigation and prosecution for ‘crime’. Different jurisdictions approach this issue in different
ways, the US making corporate criminal responsibility easier via the rule that junior employees can
be deemed to act for the corporation; the UK and some other jurisdictions via absolute or vicarious
liability for health and safety offences, for example. The OECD and Financial Action Task Force have
pressurised countries into enhancing corporate liability for transnational bribery and all forms of
money-laundering.

White-collar and corporate crime as ‘organised’ crime

Sutherland (1983: 229-230) recognised white-collar crimes as ‘organised crime’, not in the
contemporary sense where organised crime discourse is associated with illegitimate, external
criminal gangs and criminal enterprise, but in the need to understand the formal and informal
‘organisation’ of the white-collar crime activities. Thus, ‘offenders’ may organise their behaviours
collaboratively, through structures such as “gentlemen’s’ agreements” (usually male), trade
associations, cartels, and so on, with the aim of influencing legislation or restricting law enforcement
as well as fixing prices, etc.. In less regulated economies, businesses may seek to manipulate or
restrain trade in their favour e.g. a corporation would more likely reward their advertising agencies
that increase sales, irrespective of the honesty of their methods. For Sutherland (1983: 230) one of
the few significant points of difference between the white-collar criminal and the ‘professional thief’
is their self- and public perception.

With this in mind, we can usefully consider how contemporary white-collar and corporate crimes are
organised. By analysing ‘organisation’, we can identify those relations and practices that are
necessary and those that are contingent to the accomplishing of criminal enterprise (see Lord and
Levi, 2016). This implies understanding (i) how and why motivated offenders recognise and exploit
such financial crime opportunities, (ii) how they generate and manage the finances for and from the
bribes, (iii) the types of skill sets, knowledge and expertise that they need (or need to recruit) to
organise the bribes, and (iv) the conditions that facilitate this organisation. By thinking in terms of
‘how would-be offenders confront problems of gaining finance, gaining access to crime
opportunities, and retaining their freedom and crime proceeds’ (Levi, 2009b: 225), we can begin to
understand how social/criminal networks are established and maintained for criminal enterprise
within legitimate business structures, networks and situations. If we begin to organise our thinking
to consider bribery in terms of the ‘skill sets, contacts, start-up capital, and running costs that they
require’ (Levi, 2009b: 231), we can recognise necessity in terms of the convergence in space and
time of a specific situation (e.g. a vulnerability in the procurement chain converging at a time and
location), a target (e.g. the perceived simplicity of bribery through hospitalities), and the absence of
capable guardians (e.g. inadequate anti-corruption regulation and oversight). Offenders need to
have skills and confidence as well as motivation.

Explaining White-Collar and Corporate Crimes

There are a number of different foci in the explanation of these crimes, just as there are for other
forms of crime but with the additional issue that many white-collar and corporate crimes are policed
by non-police agencies, all with their varied approaches to regulation and use of the criminal law.
We should analyse (i) the immediate actions of individuals (and their nature) in the contexts of
 6

offending environments, (ii) how and why opportunities are ‘made the most of’ by individuals, and
(iii) how these issues relate to the wider economic and structural landscape.

Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

The search for individual differences between ‘criminals’ and ‘the rest of us’ that characterized 19th
and early 20th century criminology was never applied to white-collar criminals because they were not
in jail. Where fraud has been included in such studies - for example in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s
(1990) general theory of crime - the focus has been not on elite managers (few of whom are
convicted) but on high-frequency deceivers (like credit card and welfare fraudsters) who
demonstrate some of the same personality traits that characterize other ‘mainstream’ delinquents.
It might be fruitful to examine the links between impulsivity, the cultures of masculinity and high-risk
economically harmful decisions taken by stock and derivatives market traders rather than by street
market traders, as well as by senior banking executives in search of those short-term performance-
related bonuses that will move them from millionaire to billionaire (or that seek to avoid their
travelling in the reverse direction): however little such research has been done, and senior bankers
are less accessible than market traders to cortisol/testosterone measurement (Levi, 1994; Benson;
Coates, 2013; Piquero and Piquero, 2016). Some self-report studies have challenged the unusualness
of low-end white-collar crime. Karstedt and Farrall (2006; 2007) surveyed a random sample of over
4,000 25–65 year-olds in England and Wales, the former East Germany and the former West
Germany. 61 per cent self-reported that they committed at least one out of a list of offences against
business, government or against employers at work: common practices were paying cash in hand to
avoid taxation, keeping money when given too much change, wrongly using and swapping identity
cards for own gain and cheating in second-hand sales.

A focus on differences between individuals in the propensity to commit crime may lead us to neglect
situational influences on criminality, including the sheer length of time taken for some white-collar
and corporate offences to unfold. Thus, Levi (2008) examined bankruptcy (and other) frauds in terms
of a threefold typology:

1. pre-planned frauds, in which the business scheme is set up from the start as a way of
defrauding victims (businesses, public sector and/or individuals)
2. intermediate frauds, in which people started out obeying the law but consciously turned to
fraud later and
3. slippery-slope frauds, in which deceptions spiralled, often in the context of trying – however
absurdly and over-optimistically - to rescue an essentially insolvent business or set of
businesses, escalating losses to creditors.

One aspect upon which Sutherland and his followers focused was on the learned attitudes to the
situational morality of business conduct – later described as ‘techniques of neutralization’ by
sociologists and ‘cognitive dissonance’ by psychologists. In both academic and forensic professional
circles, a popular concept is the ‘fraud triangle’, which has received a great deal of research
attention, and which outlines necessary conditions in the commission of fraud. Albrecht et al. (1982:
34) follow Cressey (1953) in his classic study of embezzlement in arguing that people became
embezzlers if and only if all three conditions of the fraud triangle are evident: “There must be (1) a
non-sharable problem, (2) an opportunity for trust violation, and (3) a set of rationalizations that
 7

define the behaviour as appropriate in a given situation”. In one recent study, Switzerland and
Austria’s “elite” white-collar offenders with high professional standing and respectability were
interviewed (Schuchter and Levi, 2015). They consider that though perceived pressure from peers
outside and inside the firm is salient to most frauds, the common core is only motivation. Schuchter
and Levi (2015) concluded that the frequently cited “rationalisation” is too simplistic: rather, among
those interviewed, a fraud-inhibiting inner voice before the crime and a guilty conscience after it
were present. Whether this is true more generally remains to be determined.

Personality differences versus learning to commit fraud

It is not clear whether there is any personality difference between ‘fraudsters’ and others (as argued
by Babiak and Hare, 2007, who see fraudsters as an identifiable sub-set of psychopaths)1, or whether
fraud results more from differential socialization into particular (sub)cultures (see Shover and
Hochstetler, 2006; Benson and Simpson, 2015). The latter ‘fraud is normal’ (at least in particular
occupational settings) view over-predicts the actual incidence of fraud among those with
opportunities to commit it, whereas the ‘fraudsters are psychopaths’ view under-estimates the
prevalence of deception in the general population by focusing on high-frequency career fraudsters.
Both models have difficulty in accounting for change in general levels of fraud between societies,
over time and – for individuals – over the life course. The foci on personality attributes and on
differential association may not be mutually exclusive: indeed it seems unlikely that fraud is fully
explicable in either framework alone. Psychiatrists long held that there was a category of ‘creative
psychopaths’ who were successful liars, though why they became such was unexplained. Some
psycho-biologists consider that such persons can be identified from questionnaires and brain scans,
and Babiak and Hare (2007) suggest that ‘snakes in suits’ most commonly suffer from narcissistic
personality disorder: showing an excessive need for admiration, a sense of superiority and
entitlement, and a lack of empathy. So individual differences in propensity to commit white-collar
crime is moulded both by heredity and environment, within a context of different situational
opportunities (Duffield & Grabosky, 2001).

Like most of the embezzlers studied by Nettler (1974) – critiquing Cressey (1953) - pre-planned
bankruptcy fraudsters knew what they were doing and that what they were doing was against the
criminal law. By and large, they did not seem unduly troubled morally by this, having quite cynical
views about the morality of ordinary business and being unchallenged by those around them (Levi,
2008). Notwithstanding, the most serious (but not the most commonly committed) frauds are
committed not by vanishing swindlers using false personal names and/or intentionally short-term
corporate names, but by senior executives using their own names, manipulating – with the knowing,
wilfully blind, or unwitting assistance of their professional advisers (or ‘enablers’ in the parlance of
the police) - the exchange values of largely phony financial instruments while hoping to enjoy long
executive careers with multiple corporate partners.

Wheeler (1992) argues that elites engage in crime not because of greed or financial gain but because
of the fear of losing their possessions and standing. Therefore, fear of falling may be more important

1
It may be impossible to tell when accounts by offenders (and non-offenders) of their motivations (a) are
genuinely believed by the fraudsters, and (b) represent their ‘true’ motivations at the time they contemplated
and committed their offences (Levi, 2008).
 8

than the fear of failing to explaining involvement in intermediate or slippery-slope white-collar

crime. The sense of entitlement, combined with confidence in impunity, can account for the clear
abuse of corporate facilities (jets, hotels and restaurants) for private benefit by senior executives.
What the effects of prosecutions for the latter offences may be on general deterrence remain
unknown (Paternoster, 2016).

Criminal careers and white-collar crimes

Given the decision to offend, what forms of white-collar crime constitute a ‘rational choice’ depends
on the confidence, skills and contact set of any given individual offenders, as well as the situation in
which they find themselves: as Cressey (1955) noted, all accountants can embezzle. The presence or
absence of ‘crime networks’ known to and trusted by the willing offender makes a difference to
‘crime capacitation’: an issue often neglected in individualized explanations of involvement in crime.
Choice of crime type might also be affected by age. Those in their 50s and over might not be
attracted towards the technological challenges of cyber-enabled crimes, and the age gap might
apply to the choice of co-offenders as it does to other features of contemporary life. This is a general
proposition about the relationship between age and risk-taking/innovation.

KPMG (2016) examined ‘company fraud’ cases which its forensic departments investigated over
recent years, whether or not prosecuted: unstated, the willingness of clients to pay to hire KPMG
means that such frauds are more likely to be serious in impact and involve senior personnel. Most
fraudsters are between the ages of 36 and 55 (69 percent of fraudsters investigated); predominantly
male (79 percent compared with 85 percent in 2007); 65 percent are employed by the company
(38% for over six years); hold an executive or director level position (35 percent); described as
autocratic (18 percent) and are three times as likely to be regarded as friendly as not; likely to have
colluded with others (62 percent of frauds, down from 70 percent in the 2013 survey); and
motivated by personal gain (60 percent), greed (36 percent) and the sense of ‘because I can’ (27
percent). Why greed is different from person gain – rather than just an expression of moral
condemnation- is not considered. The Association of Certified Fraud Accountants conducts biennial
surveys of its worldwide members, though with a poor response rate which – as with most such
surveys – makes it hard to know what to infer from it about typical behaviour: the most recent gives
many interesting details about perpetrators, victims and contexts, and shows that the more senior
the insider offender, the greater the losses (ACFE, 2016). None of these datasets include frauds
against individuals perpetrated from outside otherwise legitimate businesses.

In the criminal careers literature, late onset and non-violent offenders have been neglected:
longitudinal studies tend to start at age 8-10 and end before major white-collar crime opportunities
present themselves. Convicted white-collar offenders in the US, UK and the Netherlands are typically
male, white, and about ten years older than non–white-collar offenders, and are from the middle
class of society; have previous arrests and convictions (though not at the same rate as non–white-
collar offenders); and have committed both white-collar and non–white-collar types of crimes (Onna
et al., 2014; Piquero and Piquero, 2016; Soothill et al., 2012). Some Dutch fraud offenders are early
onset, high frequency offenders, whereas others are late onset, low frequency offenders (Onna et
al., 2014); a construct also supported by the Organised Crime Monitor data from the Netherlands,
 9

showing a substantial proportion apparently turning to major fraud and organised crime business-
enabled offences in middle age (van Koppen et al., 2010a, 2010b).

Soothill et al. (2012: 782) in the last of a series of thoughtful follow-up studies of middle class
offenders over 35 years, concluded that ‘middle-class offenders who are more prolific tend to be
generalists (including committing white-collar crime) rather than specialists in a particular type of
crime’, but a quarter of low-rate white-collar offenders were reconvicted of white-collar offences.
However, what such studies have not yet told us is how the type of offences change over time, as
perhaps it becomes harder for those convicted to gain specialised access that would enable them to
commit particular offences (or to go straight).

White-collar offenders had longer criminal careers (Piquero and Weisburd, 2009). Some of the
offenders continued into their 70s, as did some British offenders (Levi, 2008). Piquero and Benson
(2004) argue that this is best understood as punctuated situationally dependent offending, in which
some traditional offending similar to other offenders occurs in late adolescence, and then white-
collar crime develops later in life when most people have given up crime altogether. The opportunity
to offend – whether that ends up being labelled as white-collar crime, organised crime, or not crime
at all - may become available to the individual only after he or she has obtained a certain
occupational position; and the motivation may be activated only if the individual experiences some
crisis in his or her personal or occupational life. On the other hand, many frauds do not require any
established organisational role – indeed in the case of many cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent
frauds, they may be in a different continent! - and one lesson from all this research is that it is
absurd to expect a coherent pattern of criminality and criminal careers from such a variegated set of
criminal activities. Finally, Sutherland (1983: 227) and Wang and Holtfreter (2012) stress levels of
corporate recidivism, which is a different focus from that on individuals in the analyses above.

The importance of the organisational context, structure, culture and

opportunity
We might explain individual offending behaviour in relation to (i) the rational choices that those with
opportunities make in pursuit of personal (or organisational) gain as the lure of offending, together
with a lack of restraint and oversight, and perhaps changing circumstances, becomes more tempting
(see Shover and Hochstetler, 2006), (ii) how such individuals might rationalise or ‘neutralise’ their
offending behaviour (e.g. ‘everyone is at it’, ‘I was protecting the business’), or (iii) the lack of
attachments that such individuals have to society (e.g. perceiving there to be no direct victims as is
the case of most ‘conventional’ crimes). However, individual level explanations do not sufficiently
account for the influence of organisational cultures or wider political-economic/cultural structures
and can ‘underestimate the pressures within society and organizational structures which impel those
individuals to commit illegal acts’ (Schrager and Short, 1977: 410). Thus, contextualised theories of
rational choice, and the dynamics between choice, organisation, opportunity and context (Benson et
al., 2016) are most promising in explaining white-collar and corporate crimes. Such theories ‘build
from a rational actor framework that shows how offending decisions are affected by instrumental
and normative considerations. Such theories can take into account micro-, meso-, and macro-level
influences and have important policy implications’ (Simpson, 2013: 325; see also Vaughan, 2007).
 10

We can analyse these different levels through the lens of the organisation and organisational
cultures. The organisation provides the means, setting, rationale and opportunity for corporate
deviance (Punch, 1996, 2011). Some organisations may exhibit pathological characteristics (e.g. a
diffusion of responsibility, an absence of clear operating procedures, low internal compliance or
destructive social dynamics), but such associations and internal linkages are difficult to test
empirically. Except where a trail of emails and internal phone recordings make them manifest – as in
recent banking rate fixing scandals – it can be difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that senior
staff had active knowledge of misconduct. Such difficulties in attributing liability are quite unlike
those in areas of crime for gain where we have merely to link the actor to the act.

The attitudes of senior managers have long been recognised as important (Clinard and Yeager, 1980)
as the ‘tone from the top’ shapes how behaviours are (re)defined as acceptable or not. But rather
than having a cohesive and singular ‘corporate culture’, there may also be sub-cultures in
organisational and institutional settings that can be in tension, with the key being to understand
how and why the priorities of certain cultures, groups or departments are considered more
important than others. For instance, the professional ethics of lawyers or accountants may give way
to commercial pressures to advise how far companies can get away with certain activities, as they
try to hit their own personal commercial targets set by the firm. The organisational mindset is
further reinforced through processes of organisational selection and socialisation while ‘walls of
secrecy and silence’ may also emerge as colleagues, through cognitive dissonance, concerted
ignorance or an absence of interest or fear of disclosing the truth, do not blow the whistle on
deviance within the workplace (van de Bunt, 2010).

Organisations, occupations and industries vary in the pressures and opportunities for crime and
deviance. For example, recent cases involving businesses using ‘defeat devices’ to falsify emissions
data in the auto industry, bribing doctors to prescribe their medical products, or adulterating food
products with cheaper – sometimes toxic - alternatives, raise questions about how pervasive
criminal behaviour is in certain industries, which are sometimes hard to prove or to falsify. Some
would argue that business is criminogenic (Clarke, 1990; Punch, 1996; Slapper and Tombs, 1999) and
that to ‘understand the social embeddedness of deviant and criminal business behaviour it is
essential to grasp that the business organization is the weapon, the means, the setting, the
rationalization, the offender, and the victim’ (Punch, 1996: 214). Managers, in response to internal
and external business pressures, engage in a wide spectrum of deviant behaviours at certain times
and under certain conditions to cope with the problems they encounter in the corporate working
environment (Punch, 1996: 214).

However, there is a danger of sociological or organisational determinism. Pace Clarke (2012),

opportunity alone does not ‘make the thief’ but if the cultural conditions are conducive, then
offending is more likely. Practices, processes and collective decisions to benefit the corporation
become more than simply the sum of individual actions (Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993; Punch, 1996).
In such settings, the morality, voice and internal restraints of ‘good’ individuals may be suspended
and become lost in the ‘groupthink’ of the organisation, a context reinforced by the potential for the
depersonalisation of one’s actions and the cognitive dissonance of colleagues. Rationality becomes
bounded with amoral calculations for the benefit of the business taking priority (Kagan and Scholz,
1984). Thus, the structure, culture and personality/identity of business are key variables that help us
 11

explain why some companies and managers turn to deviant solutions/practices (Punch, 1996). The
same logic can be applied to Russian and other drug cheating in the Olympics and World
Championships.

Fligstein and Roehrkasse (2016) try to integrate these different levels, noting that the financial crisis
of 2007 to 2009 was marked by widespread fraud in the mortgage securitization industry, shown by
large regulatory settlements in which many of the largest banks paid multibillion-dollar penalties.
They found that theories emphasizing the impact of deregulation or technical opacity identify only
necessary, not sufficient, conditions. Their argument focuses instead on changes in competitive
conditions and firms’ positions within and across markets. As the supply of mortgages began to
decline around 2003, mortgage originators lowered credit standards and engaged in predatory
lending to shore up corporate unit profits (and, in our view, their personal bonuses). In turn,
mortgage-backed securities issuers and underwriters who were part of giant banks and building
societies committed securities fraud to conceal this misconduct and to enhance the value of other
financial products.

We must also consider the wider cultural and political-economic context for white-collar and
corporate offending. For instance, the geo-historical context has seen the emergence of an
enterprise culture that promotes individualism, together with free-market principles and
deregulation. This has produced social inequality and a high-risk culture accompanied by legal and
political support (e.g. the creation of limited liability companies to reduce risk of failure). For Slapper
and Tombs (1999: 141), the ‘structural necessities of contemporary capitalism’ require the
prioritisation of profit leading to amoral calculations on the part of corporations and shapes the
extent to which such crime is seen as more or less acceptable. While this may be persuasive to many
readers, such a perspective over-predicts criminality as economic markets are relatively stable, as
ethical and morally responsible corporate policies can be profitable, and as notable legal and
regulatory improvements (under consumer and worker pressure) have been made to govern
business criminality. Furthermore, the detection of serious violations can threaten profitability –
though such threats may be beyond the short time-horizons of staff enjoying performance bonuses -
while we also see frauds in several non-business contexts (e.g. charity organisations, state
institutions) where we might expect the organisational cultures to be different.

Policing, Prosecuting and Regulating

We have established that white-collar and corporate crimes are varied in their victim/offender
relationships, size, longevity, and skills required, as are the offenders and explanations of their
behaviour. There is further diversity regarding policing strategies and who is responsible for these.
Note the use of ‘policing’ rather than ‘the police’ here, because although ‘plural policing’ (Jones, this
volume) has been increasingly used to describe the way formal social control operates in the sphere
of ‘ordinary’ crimes and public order, the number and diversity of modes of policing for white-collar
and corporate crimes is arguably much greater. Indeed, the history of business regulation is shot
through with specialist bodies that have been set up apart from the police (in rough historical order)
to handle direct and indirect taxes, workplace health and safety, food and drink adulteration,
pollution, financial services regulation, etcetera. For these bodies, criminal prosecution is
overwhelmingly the road not taken, and though studies of the police in many countries have
 12

highlighted the role of discretion, criminal prosecution is much more routinised for theft, robbery
and street violence than it is for their equivalents in crimes by or even against the corporation.

Myriad state authorities are involved in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar and
corporate crimes. In the UK, these include government and non-government licensed regulatory
authorities (including the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA),
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Environment Agency (EA), the
Solicitors Regulation Authority and other regulators of the professions, and the Department for
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Companies Investigation Branch); law enforcement
authorities - including the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), National Crime Agency (NCA) and economic
and specialist crime units within police forces e.g. primarily the City of London Police (CoLP)
Economic Crime Directorate (Doig and Levi, 2013); and international agencies (including the
European Fraud Office (OLAF), Europol, and Interpol. A similar variation exists within the US. The FBI
(including its IC3 internet fraud reporting process), the New York Department of Financial Services,
the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and the Department of Justice (DoJ) are the principal
criminal investigation and prosecution bodies. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), the US Secret Service (for counterfeiting and payment card fraud), and the Federal Trade
Commission also have oversight of fraud, and there is a plethora of regulators with enforcement
powers. In Federal systems (including Australia, Germany and the US), there are usually State as
well as Federal criminal investigation bodies. Civil Law systems tend to have more unified systems in
which white-collar crimes are dealt with in the same ways as others: but they may be decentralised
and under pressure to deal with large numbers of cases, generating delays and short cuts. There is
no space in this chapter for a review of regulatory processes, but they tend to be based around
particular issues like health & safety at work or pollution.

This diversity of responsibility presents difficulties in establishing what an ‘adequate enforcement’

framework should look like (see Lord and Levi, 2015). For instance, competing ideologies have
shaped arguments over the most appropriate model of policing white-collar and corporate crimes,
containing both symbolic and instrumental elements, where there is often a significant problem in
measuring levels of misconduct and assessing the effects of enforcement decisions, often cross-
border. The 1980s and 1990s saw debates around the purported role of criminal prosecution as
being a tool of last resort or a fundamental part of the enforcement response (Reiss, 1984), and
often characterised by the contrast between the ‘compliance’ (Clarke, 1990; Hawkins, 1998) and
‘deterrence’ (Pearce and Tombs, 1998; Slapper and Tombs, 1999) approaches. Croall (2003) analysed
the primary strategies, arguments and assumptions of these binary positions. She suggests that
‘regulation’ seeks to secure and maintain standards by encouraging compliant behaviour through
persuasion and cooperation (assuming potential offenders are willing to comply), with self-
regulation and private remedies being the preferred outcomes; while ‘crime control’ seeks to punish
and prosecute offenders, foregrounding deterrence (assuming potential offenders are amoral
calculators) and moral condemnation through public justice. Attempts to persuade are argued to be
more effective due to the inherent complexity of the offences (i.e. difficult to detect, evidential
obstacles) and associated delay and financial costs of prosecution, but less effective as low
prosecution rates undermine deterrence and the close relations between regulator and regulatee
can risk regulatory capture (which may be deliberate on the part of business and the career
prospects of regulators). The discourse associated with the two models also varies, with the
 13

regulated activities being viewed respectively as technical violations (i.e. mala prohibita) and
inherently ‘bad’ like ‘real crimes’ (i.e. mala in se). ‘Occupational crimes’ involving specific individual
accused and where the organisation is a victim are more likely to be subject to criminal law, while
‘organisational crimes’ where individual responsibility is harder to establish and where the business
has benefited, are more likely subject to regulatory control.

There is much overlap between the models in practice, and not just as a reflection of the ‘punish or
persuade’ pyramid of enforcement espoused by Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) in the context of the
regulation of ‘repeat players’. ‘The lines between regulatory and criminal procedures are becoming
more tangled and blurred’ and in the area of corporate crime, the ‘enforcement of criminal
law…increasingly uses classic regulatory techniques of negotiation and settlement’ (Wells 2011: 15,
13), although increased political will, proactive inspectorial strategies and increased resources can
enable prosecution (Slapper and Tombs 1999: 186; see also Almond 2013; Pearce and Tombs 1998;
Tombs and Whyte 2007). Current ‘policing’ of variegated white-collar and corporate crimes
incorporates features of both ‘Old Governance’ (i.e. state-centric, centralized, bureaucratic
expertise, mandatory rules) and ‘New Governance (i.e. state orchestration, decentralized, dispersed
expertise, soft law) (Abbot and Snidal 2009) in ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Braithwaite, 2008).
Additionally, policing incorporates a range of state and non-state actors, such as intergovernmental
and nongovernmental organisations (see Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson,
2006; Abbott and Snidal, 2013), who interact with both public and private actors in pursuing
harmonised, trans-national legal and normative standards. Models of ‘responsive regulation’ remain
at the forefront of attempts to control and change the undesired behaviours (see Grabosky, 2013;
Mascini, 2013; Parker, 2013) but critique emanates from the political left who use low prosecution
rates to expose the neoliberal hypocrisy of capitalist societies’ crime control ideologies (Tombs and
Whyte, 2013, 2015). Furthermore, there is a lack of credibility in graduated sanctions models when
prosecutions are so rare (Lord, 2014; Lord and Levi, 2015). Anti-money laundering measures have
featured heavily in the fight against Grand Corruption and other crimes, alongside an array of
prosecutions, Deferred Prosecution Agreements against large banks and accounting firms, and civil
and regulatory sanctions, but the effects these on underlying crimes are largely unanalysed (Levi et
al., 2014, forthcoming).

Due to the diversity of the crimes, it is difficult to conceptualise the policing response to specific
white-collar offences. Distinctions in response have been made between ‘crimes against social
regulation’ (i.e. offences causing physical, human harms) and ‘crimes against economic regulation’
(i.e. offences of a financial nature, often against the state and economic system) (Slapper and
Tombs, 1999: 196), though this focuses away from many blue collar and white-collar crimes. This is
most clear in the fines levied against business for such offences. For example, at the time of writing,
the highest British fine levied for the death of an employee was £700,000 against Baldwins Crane
Hire by Preston Crown Court/Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in December 2015. (Since the
coming into force of the Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007 there have been 11
prosecutions, almost all for smaller firms in which it is easier to show a connection between the
harm and the demonstrable acts of senior people.) In contrast, Barclays Bank was fined £284m in
2015 by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for Forex failings; the FCA imposed a total of
£905,219,078 in fines in 2015 alone against 39 firms. Comparators with the treatment of ‘ordinary’
property crimes are too problematic because few such thefts are anywhere near as large as the
 14

median economic crimes, but also because the range of regulatory and self-regulatory sanctions is
simply unavailable for them, making it policing by the police or nothing, though restorative and
community penalties are possible.

Prosecuting white-collar and corporate crimes

Readers may wonder why there is such a difference between the ways we treat white-collar and
‘ordinary’ crimes for gain: this may be understood as a mix of ideology, the ‘revolving door’
between business and regulation; and the difficulties of proving cases against respectable firms. But
there are differences between the policing and prosecution of social security fraud and of fraud
scams against consumers and investors, on the one hand, and the pursuit of health and safety
violators and serious tax evaders, on the other. In the former cases, provided that the crimes are
detected and investigated to a criminal standard, prosecution tends to be routine (though in more
recent years, ‘change of circumstances’ social security fraudsters may be dealt with by suspension
of/deduction from benefits instead); in the latter, non-criminal justice mechanisms for control are
typically explored, with prosecution or indeed law only as a last resort (Hawkins, 2002; Levi, 2010a;
Tombs and Whyte, 2015).

Some prosecutors in the US have been using techniques developed against organised crime, for
example, in insider dealing and telemarketing cases where they get one network member to give
evidence against others, even extending to insiders wearing wires to tape conversations if the
conspiracy is still going on. This has not been the case elsewhere, except where Mafia-type crime
groups are involved in public sector corruption contracts VAT frauds, or counterfeit products.

Early 2016 saw the UK’s first concluded criminal prosecution and sentencing of a company, Sweett
Group PLC, for ‘failing to prevent bribery’ by its employees in a foreign jurisdiction2, followed by a
second whose identity we are unable to disclose pending other proceedings. The boundaries of
corporate obligations to prevent corruption and/or money laundering are a contested area. The
inability of the SFO to prosecute reflects the impact of the antiquated system of corporate criminal
liability in England and Wales in shaping the normal enforcement response to corporate bribery of
accommodation and non-prosecution, despite willingness to prosecute (see Lord, 2014): note that
the after the SFO dropped the case, US authorities continued their parallel Forex investigation,
operating on a different set of corporate criminal liability principles. If prosecutions fail, this may
imperil the prosecuting body if they are seen as ‘ideological’ or incompetent; if they always succeed
in court, prosecutors may be accused of being too timid.

Sentencing white-collar and corporate criminals

Sentencing tends to follow the routines of just deserts, general and specific deterrence, and
incapacitation that are observed in other offence types, but with some special twists based around
sentencers’ perceptions of harm and dangerousness, and the relative absence of criminal records
among most of those convicted which enables them to plead that their offences were ‘out of
character’. Because of the symbolic component of white-collar crime’s association with elites, there
is also the general issue of perceived fairness of treatment in relation to offenders with less grace
from which to fall. (Restorative justice campaigners might use white-collar crime sanctioning as a

2
https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/sweett-group/
 15

role model for how to handle other types of crime.) In most cases, there is not the tabloid hysteria
that greets ‘lenient sentencing’ for many other offences, and few fraudsters unconnected with
‘organised crime’ are seen as generally dangerous. On the other hand, there has been an increasing
level of publicity about the prevalence and seriousness of fraud (especially but not only cyber-
crime), and so it is little surprise that sentencing has been rising for both elite and ‘middle-class’
criminals (though we would add ‘blue-collar’, like most payment card as well as social security
fraudsters) (Levi, 2010b; 2016; Stadler, Benson, and Cullen, 2012). These individual sentencing
models cannot, however, be read across to the sentencing of corporations, where we must also
factor in the economic consequences of conviction and of scandal independent of prosecution (Fisse
and Braithwaite, 1984; Levi, 2002). Imprisonment is usually an option only for those cases in which
there is clear evidence that owners personally instructed or implemented reckless or intentional
business decisions, e.g. where corporate manslaughter charges can be connected to individuals like
the West Virginia mine owner Donald Blankenship, jailed for a year in 2016 for misdemeanour after
workers died due to his refusal to undertake expensive safety measures. Otherwise, corporate fines
may reflect guidelines influenced by judicial perceptions of intent, harm and future likelihood of
offending, some aspects of which may be mentioned in court as mitigation or by the prosecutor
(except in the UK, where it is rare for prosecutors to advocate at the sentencing hearing). In the
growing number of Deferred Prosecution Agreement and/or Monitorship cases which bypass
criminal trial, there appears to be awareness by the regulators and prosecutors of the general level
of sanctions.

In the top 10 global banks (two of which were British), poor disclosure to clients was a factor in the
$25bn of fines paid by US banks in a 2012 settlement for abusive foreclosure practices. The second
most expensive issue for the banks was failures in how they sold residential mortgage securities,
which resulted in a penalties total of $27.7bn. The banks paid $20.2bn in fines in relation to
securitisation failures; and “rate setting” fines came to $14.6bn, partly stemming from banks’
manipulation of foreign exchange and interest rates (Financial Times, 27 March 2016). These data
reflect relatively aggressive US regulation, but exclude most of the £30 billion paid to victims of ‘mis-
selling’ of personal protection insurance, and the large fines imposed on other banks outside the Top
Ten. But they in turn raise issues of what constitutes ‘credible deterrence’ in the financial services
sector, as well as the relationship between large headline figures for fines and the proportionality to
profits from that activity, profits as a whole, and wealth. There is no doubt that enforcement has
had a big impact on the rising costs of compliance departments. Time (and transparency) may tell
whether it has a similar effect on corporate behaviour.

Below is a selection of sentences in spectacular and mostly well-publicized (see Levi 2006, 2010b)
U.S. white-collar crime cases in this century that shows what, by the standards of the rest of the
world, are long sentences; where sentences are lower, this usually reflects plea and charge
bargaining and/or substantial assistance to prosecutors:

• For a Ponzi scheme (in which investors are paid from incoming funds from new investors but
there is little genuine investment) defrauding investors of around $17.3 billion, Bernie
Madoff received a sentence of 150 years (and his brother received 10 years for assisting
him).
 16

• For a Ponzi scheme defrauding investors of around $7 billion, American Allen Stanford
received 110 years (after a not-guilty plea) in 2012, and separately was stripped of his
English knighthood.
• Russell Wasendorf Sr., ex-CEO of Peregrine, who defrauded clients of $215 million over
twenty years, was given a fifty-year sentence.
• Minor Vargas Calvo, owner of Provident Capital Indemnity (PCI) Ltd., ran a criminal
reinsurance company that fraudulently guaranteed almost half a billion dollars of life
settlement investments worldwide, and was sentenced to sixty years.
• In the Galleon insider-dealing case, Raj Rajaratnam, CEO of Galleon, was sentenced to eleven
years (plus $156 million in financial penalties) and Rajat Gupta, former director of McKinsey
and of Goldman Sachs, was given a two-year sentence (plus a $5 million fine and one year of
supervised release).
• Bernard J. Ebbers, the WorldCom Chief executive who masterminded an $11 billion
accounting fraud, got twenty-five years.
• In Enron, Jeffrey Skilling initially received twenty-four years’ imprisonment, reduced
substantially in 2013 in a deal that led to his dropping his appeal and repaying $40 million in
his seized assets to creditors (but not reinstating the more than 5,000 jobs and $1 billion in
employee retirement funds lost when Enron collapsed).
• In Enron, Andy Fastow got a reduced sentence of six years after pleading guilty and giving
evidence against Skilling and Kenneth Lay (who died before serving his sentence).

Critical criminologists may seek to explain this as symbolic gestures to mollify the retributive
instincts of the masses, but though there is an element of truth in this, it is difficult to conclude that
this is a sufficient explanation, either at the verstehen level of how judges feel and think about their
decisions (Wheeler et al., 1988) or at a more analytical level (judges can only sentence the people
put before them). Moreover, looking comparatively (Levi, 2010b), it would not explain the national
variations in sentencing, a subject that has been little examined.

Conclusion
White-collar crimes (as defined in US Federal statutes) are a broad category, ranging from credit card
and insurance frauds that most people could commit, to insider trading and price-fixing that require
significant positions of trust and socio-economic status. White-collar criminals are a heterogeneous
group in terms of their backgrounds, their involvement with ‘mainstream’ offenders, their
consciousness of transgressing social as well as legal norms, and the levels of social disapproval their
offences elicit. Weisburd and Waring (2001) usefully distinguish between occasional ‘crime as an
aberration’ offenders, intermittent ‘opportunity seekers’ and chronic ‘stereotypical criminals’; and
Piquero and Weisburd (2009) note that a focus on the propensity to commit crime is valuable only
for the last category. The general invisibility and non-prosecution of frauds make comparisons
between offenders and non-offenders perilous, but it is clear that some offenders are exceptionally
low in empathy, conscience and ‘shameability’. We now have a reasonable understanding of both
motivational and situational pathways into (though not out of) fraud, but we do not yet have a full
explanation of why some people commit white-collar crimes and others, similarly placed, do not.
 17

We agree with Haines (2016) that control measures are best understood when framed not only
around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which
they explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should influence business behaviour and the
institutional conditions under which business activity occurs. But the amount and composition of
effort to achieve controls is shaped not merely by economic interests but by culture, political
traditions, and the history of legal powers. The US historically has been the most aggressive
prosecutorial nation across the board; China is taking increasing action on corruption (at least when
not connected to current elites) and counterfeit dairy products, but there is less action on other
white-collar crimes; and other countries have varied sanctioning records. But we still know only a
modest amount about the effectiveness of controls in different contexts, and there remain
fundamental tensions between symbolic efforts at parity in the treatment of offending and
offenders ‘across the board’ and narrower efficiency and effectiveness measures in looking for the
optimal impact on behaviour for any given level of control expenditure. Thus despite the
opportunities for regulation as well as criminal and other sanctions, the moral philosophy of
punishment and the science of control remain far apart in white-collar crime, as they are in other
arenas of crime control.

Essay Questions
1. What is meant by the concept of ‘white-collar crime’ and how can we distinguish it from ‘ordinary’
crime?

2. Given the ambiguities and concerns over how we define it, in what ways is the concept of ‘white-
collar crime’ still useful?

3. An analysis of the concepts of white-collar and corporate crime should only include legally defined
“crimes” and legally convicted offenders. Discuss.

4. To what extent are white-collar and corporate crimes best explained by focusing on the rational
choices or the pathologies of individual offenders?

5. How can we best understand the development of ‘criminal careers’ in white-collar crimes?

6. How does the ‘policing’ and ‘regulation’ of white-collar and corporate crimes differ from the
‘policing’ and ‘regulation’ of conventional crimes? 


Further Reading
First, read the original research of Edwin Sutherland: Sutherland, E. (1983) White-collar Crime: the
Uncut Version, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. This monograph presents Sutherland’s
analysis of the ‘criminal’ activities of the 70 largest corporations in the US at the time of writing.
Second, read Sutherland, E.H. (1945) ‘Is “White-Collar Crime” Crime?’ American Sociological Review,
10(2): 132-139. This original article from Sutherland provides excellent insight into the origins of the
concepts of white-collar crime and the central analytical dilemma over the ‘crime, or not crime’
debate. As you read the article, bear in mind the geographical and historical context (i.e. 1940s USA)
 18

in which it was written. Follow this by reading Tappan, P. W. (1947) ‘Who is the criminal?’ American
Sociological Review, 12(1): 96-102. This is Tappan’s response to Sutherland. It provides a more
formal legal perspective on the nature of crime, the criminal and criminality. Third, the following
texts provide analysis from established white-collar crime scholars on key issues in white-collar and
corporate crime scholarship: Van Slyke, S., Benson, M. and Cullen, F. T. (Eds.) (2016) The Oxford
Handbook of White-Collar Crime, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Benson, M. and Simpson, S. (2015)
Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective, Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge;
Simpson, S. and Weisburd, D. (Eds.) (2009) The Criminology of White-Collar Crime, New York:
Springer; Pontell, H. and Geis, G. (Eds.) (2007) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate
Crime, New York: Springer.

Web Links
Because of the diversity of white-collar and corporate crimes, and the range of bodies dealing or not
dealing with them, there is no one place in which information about all these dimensions can be
found. Below is a limited selection.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is the UK authority responsible for investigating and prosecuting
serious and complex fraud, bribery and corruption: https://www.sfo.gov.uk/

The City of London Police Economic Crime Directorate is recognised as the national policing lead for
fraud and is dedicated to preventing and investigating fraud at all levels:
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/advice-and-support/fraud-and-economic-
crime/Pages/default.aspx

FBI website overview of ‘white-collar crime’ provides an understanding of how the concept is utilised
by law enforcement authorities in the US: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime

The five biggest corporate scandals of 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/12/27/biggest-corporate-

scandals-2015/

There are also non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in campaigning on issues such as
transnational bribery, who produce sometimes excellent reports on specific issues, with reform
agendas. See for example Transparency International (https://www.transparency.org) and its
national branches; Global Witness (https://www.globalwitness.org/); Corruption Watch
(http://www.cw-uk.org/) and its South African branch; and the Anti-Corruption Resource Centres
like http://www.u4.no/, https://www.baselgovernance.org/ and anticorrp.eu/. There is also
material on the websites of inter-governmental organisations such as the OECD, World Bank, and
UNODC.

 19

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 20

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