ABSTRACT
One of Edwin H. Sutherland's professed goals in writing about white-collar crime was to reform criminological theory. In the 1930s, when Sutherland began working in the area, criminological theory was dominated by the view that crime was concentrated in the lower social classes and was caused by the personal and social pathologies that accompany poverty. Sutherland theorized that the same general processes that cause other sorts of crime also cause white-collar crime. He argued that individual involvement in white-collar crime comes about as a result of a process called differential association. Sutherland identified two types of social disorganization: Anomie refers to a lack of standards regarding behavior in specific areas of social action; conflict of standards refers to conflict between social groups with reference to specific practices. The concept of anomie has a long history in sociology and criminology. The famous French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argued it was an important factor in suicide.
