White-Collar Crime, Organized Crime, and the Business Establishment - Resolving a Crisis in Criminological Theory (From White-Collar and Economic Crime, P 23-38, 1982, Peter Wickman and Timothy Dailey, ed. - See NCJ-82224)

• NCJ Number: 82225
• Author(s): D C Smith
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 16 pages
• Sale Source: Lexington Books
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

A spectrum-based theory of enterprise promises a framework for a better understanding of the interrelationships and the distinctions among legitimate business, white-collar crime, and organized crime.

Abstract

Three prior assumptions are important in the spectrum-based theory of enterprise: (1) that enterprise occurs across a behavioral spectrum that includes both business and certain kinds of crime; (2) that behavioral theory regarding organizations in general and businesses in particular can be applied to that entire spectrum; and (3) that whereas theories about secrecy and ethnicity may be pertinent to an understanding of business behavior, legal or criminal, they are necessarily subordinate in that understanding to a theory of enterprise. A spectrum-based theory of enterprise can emerge once it is recognized that offenses against business belong elsewhere in a comprehensive typology of crime. Such a shift would accomplish two useful objectives. First, it would facilitate studies of relational as opposed to nonrelational theft and of certain kinds of parttime crime. Second, it would facilitate a recognition that crimes of business and organized crime, being fundamentally entrepreneurial, are best understood together as alternative ways in which business can be conducted illegally. Implications that may provide helpful clues for further investigation are discussed. Twenty-four references are listed.