From White-Collar Crime to Organizational Crime: An Intellectual History

Kam C. Wong, Xavier University

Abstract

The concept of white-collar crime has been with us now for half a century. Since then it has grown into a major field of criminological study. In the intervening years there was a discernible move from the study of white-collar crime as an individual phenomenon to the study of white-collar crime as an organization practice. This shift in focus, though not anticipated by Sutherland, was nonetheless made possible by his original conceptualization of white-collar criminality. How this conceptual transformation occurred is the interest of this author and the focus of the paper.