Deviance and Organizations

In 1939 Edwin H. Sutherland directed sociologists’ attention to what he called “white-collar crime.” ¹ In his presidential address to the American Sociological Society, Sutherland declared that the profession’s single-minded concern over persons officially designated as criminal—who are primarily from the lower class—resulted in misleading theories about the causes of crime that focused on feeble-mindedness, slums, unstable families, and so on. These theories ignored the criminality of business, professional, and political persons—those who are respected and looked up to. Upper-class individuals may not commit armed robbery, but they do bribe public officials, misrepresent products in advertising, embezzle, defraud the Internal Revenue Service, and generally cost society incredible sums of money. “Respectable” people are involved in what Al Capone, an organized crime figure of the 1920s, called the “legitimate rackets.”