A Study On: White Collar Crime

Abstract

White-collar crime is becoming a bigger issue in India and around the world. We do know that there is a significant amount of white-collar crime, even though accurate statistics are hard to come by and any data we do have tends to underestimate its scope and frequency. Furthermore, the data that we do have indicates that, in India, street crimes have been declining for some time, but white-collar offenses are on the rise. Additionally, the average cost of a white-collar crime is higher than that of a street crime. This paper aims to incorporate etiological research on white-collar crime, based on the theory that criminal behavior arises from the combination of suitable opportunity and motivation. The foundation of the majority of social psychology studies on white-collar crime is the interactionist theory of motivation. Though interactionist theory ultimately falls short of explaining the causes of white-collar crime, it does help us understand it in terms of the offenders' symbolic construction of their social worlds. It is argued that the social structure of industrial capitalism and the "culture of competition" it gives rise to are the sources of symbolic motivational patterns. However, no theory of motivation, no matter how complex, can fully account for the reasons behind white-collar crime. For this reason, the paper's analysis ends with a look at the opportunities that social actors in various structural positions in developed capitalist countries are presented with.