ABSTRACT
Despite the use made of ‘white-collar crime’ by Sutherland (1983, first published 1939) to attack biological or poverty-based theories of crime, the incorporation into criminology of crimes by and against business remains at best fitful. Commercial crime is absent from almost all the recent interest in ‘The Victim’ (Fattah 1986), including victimisation surveys which-even in the rare cases where crime risks at work are examined (Mayhew et al. 1989: ch. 4)—are devoted principally to natural persons suffering at the hands of other natural persons or groups, and which thereby unintentionally reinforce popular ideologies of what ‘crime’ constitutes and who ‘the criminals’ and ‘the victims’ are. International crime and policing-of which white-collar crime is a sub-set-are even more neglected, with no real follow-up to the pioneering work of Mack (1975) on ‘the crime industry’: Anderson (1989) devotes almost no attention to fraud, counterfeiting, or any other property asportation crimes in his discussion of the politics of international police co-operation, and this in turn largely reflects the greater police interest in cross-border drug-trafficking and terrorism than in theft and deception.
