Crimes of the Powerful Flashcards
How does Sutherland define White Collar Crime?
A crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation
What two types of crime does Sutherland’s definition fail to distinguish between?
Occupational Crime: committed by employees for own personal gain against the company (e.g. embezzlement)
Corporate Crime: committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals (e.g. deliberately miss-selling product to inc. company profits)
What are the Explanations of Corporate crime?
Strain theory (Merton)
Differential Association (Sutherland)
Labelling Theory
Marxism
How does Strain theory explain corporate crime?
If a company can’t achieve it’s goal of maximising profits by legal means, it may employ illegal ones instead
(when business conditions and profitability are strained companies may be tempted to break the law)
How is Strain theory an incomplete explanation of corporate crime?
Doesn’t explain crime in non-profit making state agencies like the police, army or civil service e.g. health and safety crimes in formerly communist regimes
How does Sutherland’s Differential Association explain crime?
crime is behaviour learned from others in a social context, the less we associate with people with attitudes that favour the law and more we spend time w/ people with deviant attitudes, the more likely we deviate ourselves
e.g. if company culture normalises committing crimes to achieve corporate goals, employees will be socialised into this criminality (link to Matza’s Neutralisation techniques)
How does labelling theory explain corporate crime?
Whether something counts as a crime depends on its label. WC actions are more likely to be defined as criminal , businesses and professionals have the power to avoid labelling through hiring expensive lawyers and accountants
How does marxism explain corporate crime?
corporate crime is just the result of the normal functioning of capitalism as it is criminogenic (inevitably causes harm, e.g. deaths of employees and consumers)
Box: capitalism has created a ‘mystification’> spread ideology that corporate crime is less widespread or harmful than WC crime by only prosecuting some crimes
What is a general criticism of these explanations for corporate crime?
Law abiding can sometimes be more profitable
Braithwaite: US pharmaceutical companies complied w FDA regulations to get their products licensed> then were able to sell their product’s to poorer countries with less strict regulations and testing facilities that relied on the FDA as a guarantee of quality
(could maximise their profits by potentially selling faulty or poor quality batches)
Why is the scale of corporate crime so large?
do more harm than ordinary or street crime like theft or burglary
e.g. the cost of white-collar crimes in the USA are over 10x that of ordinary crimes
it is more widespread, routine and pervasive
e.g. UK firm Ernst and Young tax avoidance, could have cost the taxpayer £300m p/y
What does Tombs say about the scale of corporate crime?
it has enormous costs: physical (death and injury), environmental (pollution-e.g. union carbide) and economic
What does Sutherland say about the scale of corporate crime?
its a greater threat than WC street crime because it promotes cynicism and distrust of basic social institutions (undermines society)
What are the 5 types of corporate crime?
Financial crimes
Crimes against consumers
Crimes against employees
Crimes against the environment
State-Corporate Crime
What are financial crimes?
Tax evasion, bribery, money-laundering etc
Victims: other companies, shareholders, taxpayers and governments
What are Crimes against Consumers?
False labelling, selling unfit goods
e.g. Horsemeat Scandal (2013) Tesco beef products contained high percentage of horse meat
