ABSTRACT
A rising tide of white-collar crime throughout much of the world signals unambiguously that those who commit these offences merit increased scrutiny from investigators and policy-makers. This chapter begins by documenting briefly the growing importance of white-collar offences in Western nations as well as the financial toll they exact. Descriptive comparison of the demographic characteristics of and explanations for their crimes provided by convicted white-collar criminals and street offenders shows pronounced differences. Their sources lie in the different class origins and cultural capital of white-collar and common offenders. Class-based cultural capital affects the way each construes their criminal acts, their treatment at the hands of the criminal justice apparatus and research participation. Their middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds inevitably constrain the conduct of investigations in which white-collar criminals are informants or subjects. It also points to ways potentially of enhancing the validity and utility of ethnographic data collected from them.
Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, E. A. Ross (1907: 3) was among the first sociologists to note that ‘crime changes its quality as society develops’. Ross highlighted increasing social and economic interdependence and emergent forms of criminal opportunity that permit both exploitation of trust and the commission of crime at a distance from victims. The transformative developments he described continued in the years that followed, but the pace accelerated rapidly after the Second World War. Throughout the world, nations witnessed the expansion of state-funded welfare programmes of various kinds, 206the growth of insurance, a financial services revolution and the explosion of consumer credit, widespread adoption of the computer and other technologies for information sharing and financial transactions, the historically unprecedented globalisation of economic markets and relationships and, most recently, the attenuation of regulatory oversight. Spurred by these developments, the supply of white-collar criminal opportunity has increased to unprecedented levels across much of the globe (Shover and Hochstetler 2006).
The lives, decision-making and crimes of burglars, robbers and other street criminals have been the foci of ethnographic research for decades. An impressive variety of techniques and materials have been employed to examine these matters, and a remarkably consistent picture has emerged (Nee 2010; Shover and Copes 2009). White-collar offenders have received much less attention. What has been learned about them suggests, however, that they differ from their street-crime cousins in several ways that may be significant for data collection and data quality. Given the increasing importance of white-collar crime, we believe it may be useful to draw these differences into sharper relief and to examine their implications for the research enterprise and for data quality. That is our objective in the pages that follow.
The chapter begins by noting the increasing prevalence of white-collar crime in Western nations and the financial toll it exacts from victims. This is followed by comments on the demographic characteristics of convicted white-collar and common criminals. Next the presentation shifts to a description of the materials analysis of which undergirds the observations in the remainder of the chapter. Following this, note is made of differences in the descriptions of their crimes given by street criminals and white-collar criminals before we compare the class backgrounds and cultural capital of offenders reared in middle-class and working-class circumstances. The implications of middle-class cultural capital for the conduct of ethnographic research on white-collar criminals are presented next. The chapter concludes with suggestions for enhancing the quality and utility of data provided by white-collar criminals.
