The Handbook of White-Collar Crime

Melissa L. Rorie, Charles F. Wellford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781118774885
• eBook ISBN: 9781118774830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive and state-of the-art overview from internationally-recognized experts on white-collar crime covering a broad range of topics from many perspectives

Law enforcement professionals and criminal justice scholars have debated the most appropriate definition of "white-collar crime" ever since Edwin Sutherland first coined the phrase in his speech to the American Sociological Society in 1939. The conceptual ambiguity surrounding the term has challenged efforts to construct a body of science that meaningfully informs policy and theory. The Handbook of White-Collar Crime is a unique re-framing of traditional discussions that discusses common topics of white-collar crime—who the offenders are, who the victims are, how these crimes are punished, theoretical explanations—while exploring how the choice of one definition over another affects research and scholarship on the subject.

Providing a one-volume overview of research on white-collar crime, this book presents diverse perspectives from an international team of both established and newer scholars that review theory, policy, and empirical work on a broad range of topics. Chapters explore the extent and cost of white-collar crimes, individual- as well as organizational- and macro-level theories of crime, law enforcement roles in prevention and intervention, crimes in Africa and South America, the influence of technology and globalization, and more. This important resource:

• Explores diverse implications for future theory, policy, and research on current and emerging issues in the field
• Clarifies distinct characteristics of specific types of offences within the general archetype of white-collar crime
• Includes chapters written by researchers from countries commonly underrepresented in the field
• Examines the real-world impact of ambiguous definitions of white-collar crime on prevention, investigation, and punishment
• Offers critical examination of how definitional decisions steer the direction of criminological scholarship

Accessible to readers at the undergraduate level, yet equally relevant for experienced practitioners, academics, and researchers, The Handbook of White-Collar Crime is an innovative, substantial contribution to contemporary scholarship in the field.

Section V
White‐Collar Crime: An International Perspective

21
White‐Collar and Corporate Crime: European Perspectives

Christian Walburg

Introduction

Given the diversity of political, economic, legal, and social conditions and developments in European countries throughout history, it soon becomes clear that it is inappropriate to assume a specific and consistent “European” perspective on the issues of white‐collar and corporate crime. Europe today encompasses both common law and civil law jurisdictions, long‐established and new democracies, long‐lasting capitalist societies and newly established free‐market economies; only very recently, during the past three decades, have these countries undergone a radical change from command economies.

As to economic conditions, the annual gross domestic product per capita currently varies between US$106 000 (Luxembourg) and US$2700 (Moldova).¹ In 2014, among the member countries of the European Union, median gross hourly earnings ranged from €25.50 (Denmark) to €1.70 (Bulgaria).² In September 2018, the unemployment rate varied between 2.3% in the Czech Republic and 19% in Greece.³ In particular, countries in Southern Europe have been hit hard by the financial and economic crisis of 2008 and its consequences, including strict austerity policies imposed by the “Northern Eurozone.” Some countries have very export‐driven economies, and trade balances vary significantly. Despite major cutbacks since the 1980s, some Western and especially Northern European countries still have a comparatively well‐developed welfare system, while elsewhere social protection is (much) more limited.

And yet, Europe has a long history of common trade, with regional economies already having been connected by trade in the Roman Empire, or with the House of Medici, the Welser, the Fugger, or the Hanseatic League controlling significant parts of the European economy during the Late Middle Ages and early modern Europe. Nowadays, the European Single Market encompasses large parts of Europe, and European legislation plays a huge role – this is also true when it comes to definitions of and responses to business‐related crimes.

There has long been a paucity of pan‐European academic discourse and exchange on economic crime (Huisman et al. 2015). Language barriers and a lack of institutional frameworks can be identified as major reasons for this – the European Society of Criminology was founded only two decades ago, in 2000. Necessarily subjective and selective, this chapter aims at throwing the spotlight on some major developments of white‐collar and corporate crime and, particularly, its control in the European context.

Beginnings

Discomfort about greed (“pleonexia”) as a potentially harmful characteristic of “business” can be traced back as far as Plato and Aristotle, and it is also rooted in Judeo‐Christian thinking (Manstetten 2018). However, in the course of time, profit‐seeking has shifted from being seen as evil to being perceived as a virtue among an emerging class of merchants. This was underpinned by the evolution of Calvinist and liberal economic thinking, which remains based on the assumption that individual profit‐seeking, guided by the “invisible hand of the market,” will lead to generally positive outcomes – an idea already expressed in the subtitle of Mandeville's book “The Fable of the Bees” (1714) (“private vices, public benefits”), and famously put in a nutshell almost three centuries later in Stone's film “Wall Street” (1987): “greed is good.” While modern history has witnessed a tremendous increase in prosperity, such a position has always been at risk of being blind to fraud, excessive risk‐taking and other harmful or unfair business practices, exploitation of labor and other forms of abuse of power, and detrimental consequences like excessive inequality, economic bubbles, or environmental degradation.

Regulatory violations that would fall within today's concept of economic crimes have been known for more than 2000 years in Europe. Across the centuries, specific forms of fraud (e.g. food), usury, bankruptcy, health hazards, or counterfeiting have been penalized and given rise to (sometimes draconian) punishment (Tiedemann 2014). In growing urban economies, medieval guilds increasingly functioned as regulators (Ponsaers 2015). The criminalization of price collusion in the course of the French Revolution is sometimes identified as the beginning of modern European economic criminal law (Tiedemann 2014, p. 34). During and after World War I, massive shortages pushed the expansion of laws and law enforcement directed against crimes such as usury or anti‐competitive practices. Despite all such multifaceted accounts of “economic crimes” throughout European history, we need to keep in mind that in the course of overseas trading and colonialism from the sixteenth century onwards, exploitative economic activities and severe wrongdoing (which today would clearly constitute breaches of international criminal law at the intersection of state and corporate crime) went largely unpunished (Huisman et al. 2015, p. 4).

Several authors have pointed out that the Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger (1876–1940) can be identified as an early, somewhat overlooked pioneer of white‐collar criminology (Slapper and Tombs 1999, p. 2; Hebberecht 2015, pp. 125–132). Quite in line with the traditional skepticism toward commerce outlined above, but from a Marxist perspective, Bonger assumed that the “capitalist production regime” would influence the “social organization,” namely by weakening altruism and fostering egoism. The nature of the consequent crimes would differ between the social classes. As to “bourgeois criminals” and economy‐related crimes, Bonger distinguished between three forms of crime: crimes committed in reaction to declining businesses, crimes that (independent from economic downturns and facilitated by opportunities as well as a lack of control) are “simply” motivated by greed, and crimes where offenders from the start intentionally make use of the commercial sphere to enrich themselves (Hebberecht 2015). This and similar typologies have been used (and elaborated on) by white‐collar criminologists in Europe and beyond.

Developments

However, as seen in criminological studies more broadly, most theoretic impulses and empirical insights on white‐collar and corporate crime in the twentieth century came from outside (continental) Europe, namely from scholars in the United States (Slapper and Tombs 1999, p. 2). This is true for debates on definitions, structures, and causes, as well as on the control of business‐related crimes. In many European countries, political as well as academic attention to “crimes in the suites” and in the business world – and especially empirical research that is going beyond merely definitional discussions and the reproduction of officia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I: What Is White‐Collar Crime?
• Section II: Extent and Cost of White‐Collar Crimes
• Section III: What We Know About White‐Collar Offending
• Section IV: Preventing and Punishing White‐Collar Crimes
• Section V: White‐Collar Crime: An International Perspective
• Section VI: Emerging White‐Collar Crime Issues
• Index
• End User License Agreement