Organising White-Collar and Corporate Crimes

The world of crime demonology once seemed so simple. There was the Underworld, consisting of full-time criminals emanating principally from the ΓÇÿdangerous classesΓÇÖ who, depending on particular conditions, might form ΓÇÿorganised crimeΓÇÖ groups ranging from Mafias to looser collaborative networks. At the other end of the social spectrum there was the primarily law-abiding Upperworld, whose elite black sheep might occasionally stray. Sutherland sought to puncture this bifurcated model intellectually by his stress on criminality as learned behaviour and assertion that white-collar crime was ΓÇÿorganisedΓÇÖ crime. From Libor manipulation to international bribery, from corporate fraud to money laundering, the concept of white-collar crime incorporates a diverse array of criminal activities, all of which usually involve deliberate deception or dishonesty to obtain an advantage, usually financial. However, the organisation of such criminal phenomena remains intellectually under-conceptualised. This book reconceptualises the debate around white-collar crime, providing an advanced analytical framework for comprehensively understanding how such crimes are organised, why they are organised as they are, and the key factors and conditions that shape their ΓÇÿorganisationΓÇÖ over time and in particular places.