ABSTRACT
The concept of white-collar crime has come under renewed attack with calls to put an end to the term as people know it. The fodder for such attacks has been both theoretical and empirical and can be divided into three main arguments; first the concept of white-collar crime offers no theoretical value in causal explanations of crime. Second, research on sentencing white-collar offenders has produced mixed, if not benign findings on the relationship between sanction disparity and offender characteristics. Third, the concept of white-collar crime, with its emphasis on status, class, and respectability, binds to a framework based on offender characteristics, as opposed to a more useful framework based on offense characteristics. Scholars often attribute the problems of white-collar crime to Sutherland’s inconsistency and apparent ambivalence in his own definition. The social structure of trust relationships, like the social organization of work cannot be examined independent of the notions of leverage.
