ABSTRACT
Crime in the business sector has always presented criminologists with dif culties of terminology and boundary setting. e term white-collar crime is full of associative baggage arising from its important roots in pointing out that individual and corporate elites can be involved in crimes for economic gain, thereby falsifying the view that poverty is a necessary condition for crime [Sutherland, 1983]. (Relative deprivation as a cause of crime can be tasteless as well as tautological when applied to multimillionaires committing fraud when seeking to nance their lifestyles as multibillionaires.) Shapiro [1990] sought to shi its connotation when arguing that we should “collar the crime, not the criminal” and focus not on the social backgrounds of o enders but, rather, on the relationships of trust and on the practical separation of agent from principal that enable white-collar criminality to occur. However,
issues of elite involvement in criminality retain their attraction for academics and activists working in the eld. In popular media usage, white-collar crimes can be any crimes of deception, including those involving misuse of power by elites, but usually (by volume of cases if not by impact) not involving elites as o enders (though o en involving them as victims).
