Understanding Corporate Lawbreaking: From Profit Seeking to Law Finding

Abstract

At least since Sutherland's pathbreaking publication in 1949,1 American social science has had to conjure with the phenomena of ``white-collar crime.'' If not quite reluctantly, it did so only haltingly in the quarter century following Sutherland's strong lead. Subsequent work was impeded by a combination of political disinterest in (even disdain for) the topic, the consequent lack of federal agency funds for research on it, and the focus of criminologists'work on rapidly rising rates of street crime in the United States.2