SOC208H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Pension, Insider Trading, Jeffrey Skilling
Document Summary
Lecture 3 - w. c crime: defining and identifying white-collar crime. Defn: crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his. He went on to note that his defn excludes many crimes of the upper class, such as most of their cases of murder, adultery and intoxication, since there are not customarily a part of their occupational procedures. White-collar is used to refer primarily to business managers and executives. Sutherland"s defns of w. c crime are unusual b. c they refer to characteristics of the actor. For sutherland, both the status of the actor & the occupational location of the act determine whether an illegality is a w. c crime. Criticism - if social status is a defining element of crime is that it cannot then be used as an explanatory variable because it is not allowed to vary independently of the crime.
