10 MARKERS
WHITE COLLAR CRIME
White collar crime refers to financially motivated crime committed by business and government
professionals. First defined by Sutherland, 1939, as, ‘crime committed by a person of respectability
and high social status in the course of their occupation’. Sutherland argues that white collar crime did
not appear in official statistics as it was too hard to detect. The difference between white-collar crime
and blue-collar crime stems from the different types of criminal activity that the criminal has access to
engage in. More than often it is blue collar crimes appearing in the media, being prosecuted as well as
more severely, as it is easier to detect.Examples include embezzlement, tax evasion and money
laundering. Another example is Identity theft and computer system “hacking”, which are two of the
most widespread computer crimes. It’s estimated that losses from identity theft in the United States
alone totaled nearly $2 billion in 2019. California, with over 73,000 cases of identity theft reported,
was the state whose citizens suffered the most from the crime – Florida was a very distant second with
37,000 reported cases.(Corporate finance institute) White-collar crime is commonly subdivided into
two broad, general categories:Individual crimes are financial crimes committed by an individual or a
group of individuals. An example of an individual white-collar crime is a Ponzi scheme, such as the
one run by Bernie Madoff. Other individual crimes in this category include identity theft, hacking,
counterfeiting, and any of dozens of Corporate crimes, with some white-collar crime occurring on a
corporate level. For example, a brokerage firm may let its trading desk employees engage in an
insider trading scheme. Money laundering may also be conducted on a corporate level. Example =
Margaret Moran who falsely claimed £53,000 in expenses, even claiming more than £2,000 for a
landline at her home when there was no phone line fitted Marxists believe that white collar crime
costs the economy more and causes more damage than blue collar crimes. Laureen Snider (1993)
points out that the cost of White Collar Crime and Corporate Crime to the economy far outweighs the
cost of street crime by ‘typical’ criminals.
SOCIAL CONTROL
Social control regulates people’s actions, behaviours, appearance and even their thinking. It persuades
or forces individuals to conform to the main social norms and values which are learnt through early
socialisation. This in turn prevents deviance. Sanctions are a way of enforcing social control can be
good or bad, ranging from pocket money, or being knighted or on the opposite end with bad sanctions
from the naughty corner to life imprisonment. This ensures that a limited number of values are
acceptable, providing some levels of predictability and means of ‘setting the boundaries’. Social
control is provided through agencies of social control that can be either formal such as the law or
informal through the family or education. Functionalists such as Durkheim believed that crime is
inevitable, so it is also inevitable that a society has some form of boundaries to indicate acceptable/
non-acceptable behaviour. Talcottt Parsons (1937) developed one of the earliest sociological
perspectives on social control. He argued that conformity was not just produced by external agencies
forcing individuals to obey rules through the threat of punishment, but also through individuals
internalising norms and values through socialisation. Reckless and Hirschi also used social control to
explain why people do not commit crime. Reckless suggests that society has many processes of outer
control that cause inner control within us such as identity. Hirschi believed crime was prevented by
careful socialisation in childhood and the development of strong social bonds. Interactionists use the
labelling perspective to see social control and deviance as having an ironic relationship. The more the
, agencies of social control try to prevent deviance, by labelling and policing certain behaviours as
deviant, then the more deviance will be created. A lot of research from the interactionist perspective
has focused on how it is certain types of people,rather than behaviours, who tend to get labelled as
deviant, and thus are more likely to become deviant.
DEVIANCE
Deviance is behaviour which is considered socially unacceptable, it does not conform with the
dominant norms and values of a specific society. If someone is viewed as deviant, negative sanctions
will normally occur. Examples include talking loudly whilst in the library, illegally deviant, and
driving whilst on the phone,legally deviant. Deviance can be both legal and illegal and examples of
punishment can include exclusion and ridicule. Plummer (1979) discusses two aspects of defining
deviance, using the concepts of societal deviance and situational deviance. Societal deviance refers to
forms of deviance that most members of a society regard as deviant because they share similar ideas
about approved and unapproved behaviour – murder, rape, child abuse and driving over the alcohol
limit in the UK generally fall into this category. Situational deviance refers to the way in which an act
being seen as deviant or not depends on the context or location in which it takes place. These two
conceptions of deviance suggest that, while there may be some acts that many people agree are
deviant in one society, those acts defined as deviant will vary between groups within a society.
Actions can be deviant but not necessarily criminal. Defining an act as deviant is part of a wider social
process. The Office of National Statistics does not record deviant acts unless they are viewed as
criminal. The acceptability of behaviour depends on who is acting this way, where they are, the
culture, the time and the circumstance, Deviance is a social construction. Lemert made a distinction
between primary and secondary deviance. Most people who escape discovery of their deviance are not
stigmatised as deviants usually don’t realise they are deviant at all.Some deviance is absolute but most
is relatively defined. Sutherland suggests that just as people are socialised into conforming by society,
they can also be socialised into crime if others around them are criminal.
DEVIANCY AMPLIFICATION
Deviancy amplification is a term used by interactionist sociologists to refer to the way levels of
deviance or crime can be increased by the societal reaction to deviance itself.‘Deviancy amplification’
was coined by Leslie Wilkins (1964) to describe how agencies like the police and media can actually
generate an increase in deviance.A contributor to deviancy amplification is the interactionist
"labelling theory". Labelling theory has been applied to the representation of certain groups in the
mainstream media Interactionists argue that the media has a long history of exaggerating the deviance
of youth subcultures in particular, making them seem more deviant than they actually are, which
creates a ‘moral panic’ among the general public, which in turn leads to the authorities clamping
down on the activities of those subcultures, and finally to the individuals within those subcultures
responding with more deviance. A moral panic is “an exaggerated outburst of public concern over the
morality or behaviour of a group in society.” Many regard the ‘Middleton Studies’, conducted in the
USA in 1925, as perhaps the first example of deviancy amplification.Lynd and Lynd (1929 and 1937)
identified how community and religious leaders in small town ‘Middleton’ condemned radio for
promoting immoral behaviour. Deviant subcultures have often been the focus of moral panics.
According to Interactionists, the Mass Media has a crucial role to play in creating moral panics
through exaggerating the extent to which certain groups and turning them into ‘Folk Devils’, people
