9 Employee Theft and Staff Dishonesty

The concept of ‘white collar crime’ was formally introduced during Edwin Sutherland’s presidential address to the American Sociological Society in Philadelphia in 1939. Sutherland (1949) used the term to help establish his new crime theory, differential association, by challenging the discipline of criminology to pay more attention to crimes ‘committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of his/her [legitimate] occupation.’ Today, ‘white collar crime’ has become an umbrella concept often used to describe a host of criminal behaviors, including but not limited to, illegal financial acts, deceitful or dishonest business practices, or abuses of state power. Scholars generally include employee theft, embezzlement, corporate crime, computer crimes and even political or governmental crimes as primary examples. While white collar crime continues to be used as a crime category, most scholars have developed more precise definitions that focus on specific types of either occupational or corporate crime. An early landmark work in this area was the classic study by Donald Cressey (1953) who interviewed numerous incarcerated embezzlers. Perhaps the most widely recognized differentiation of the major sub-types of white collar crime is represented in Clinard and Quinney’s (1973) effort which dichotomized the concept of white collar crime into two subcategories, namely, occupational and corporate crime. They asserted that white collar crime was too broad a topic and could not be classified as a single group of acts. Separating the concept into two sub-categories, Clinard and Quinney, were the first to distinguish clearly occupational crime from corporate crime. These offenses include violations of criminal law committed by an individual or group of individuals during the course of activity within a legitimate occupation for personal gain. The importance of this division is that occupational crime focuses exclusively on criminal acts that benefit the individual, and specifically excludes Sutherland’s emphasis on ‘high social status’ offenders. Thus, a criminal act committed by any employee within an organization is considered occupational white collar crime. For Clinard and Quinney, Sutherland’s use of ‘respectable’ or ‘high status’ restricted the breadth of white collar crime, since employees other than executives or managers could

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