Author: Edited by Melissa L Rorie
ISBN No: 978-1-118-77479-3
Review date: 20/04/2024
No of pages: 544
Publisher: Wiley
Publisher URL:
https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Handbook+of+White+Collar+Crime-p-9781118774793
Year of publication: 09/01/2020
Brief:
price
£148 hardback
This Handbook of White-Collar Crime is costly – £133 even as an e-book. In fairness you do get a full treatment, whether by region; theory to explain it; or topic, such as compliance monitoring and whistle-blowing, public attitudes, where tech might take ‘occupational crime’ next, and what law enforcers and regulators do (or don’t).
If white-collar crime sounds an old-fashioned term in these days of CEOs with open-necked shirts, it’s worth recalling (as the opening chapter does set out) how striking the phrase – first aired in the US in 1939 – was, and is, now given new dress as ‘corporate crime’ or ‘crimes of the powerful’.
The man behind the phrase, the US criminologist Edwin Sutherland, teased it out over decades, and remains one of the most‐cited criminological authors, and ‘an iconic figure’. For instance he touched on sociology, with the idea of socialisation, when more junior employees are ordered by their managers to do things which they regard as unethical or illegal; another method is when employees learn from peers how to ‘get ahead’. Morals, then, are involved here; besides the management and historical development of business organisations, for as old standards break down and new ones have not yet developed, who is not to say that the white-collar criminal is not merely clever, or ahead of his time?!
While firms that carry out or indeed are victims of such crime may be shy of going public with details, Sutherland and others since have covered many cases. And the field is vast: public utilities and private companies: ‘trade restraint, rebates, patents, trademarks, and copyrights, misrepresentation in advertising, unfair labor practices, financial manipulations’, as the authors of the opening chapter, Aleksandra Jordanoska and Isabel Schoultz, set out.
While the chapters by several authors are largely from North America, the phrase still should make us pause – criminals can be mentally well, well-off, and upstanding members of their societies. They act because they can, not because they need to because of poverty. To return to that idea of globalisation, white-collar criminals are, if anything, only becoming more elusive. The challenge to criminal law all along remains; because it’s under‐enforced or ineffective in a country, let alone when corporate crime (or war crimes) are across borders – the book mentions the London Inter‐bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) manipulation scandal.
As that all may imply, this subject is political; as those opening authors write, though white-collar crime may be ‘incredibly harmful, such violations are handled outside of the criminal justice system for numerous reasons: prosecutorial discretion toward prioritising “street crime”; lack of resources to investigate
and sanction complex corporate crime; lack of criminalisation due to political influences and lobbying by corporations’. Sutherland, they suggest, revolutionised criminological thinking by arguing for the need of theory and research, quite apart from these crimes by ‘robber barons’ and the upper classes being much‐neglected.
