White-Collar Crime: An Agenda for Research

• NCJ Number: 177245
• Date Published: January 1982
• Length: 243 pages
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored

Annotation

Not intended as an actual research agenda on white-collar crime, eight papers focus on issues that should be addressed in the planning of such a research agenda.

Abstract

Following an introductory overview of why the colloquium selected the topics presented in these papers, a paper discusses issues in determining the consequences of white-collar crime; attention is given to the kinds of data and substantive topics that future research concerned with this subject might consider. A second paper describes and analyzes corporate violations of the Corrupt Practices Act; it includes an analysis of the ways in which organizational forces, not just individual proclivities, relate to corporate criminality. A case study is presented of one corporate violator, the Gulf Oil Corporation. A third paper addresses the special, if not unique, values of involving the police in the fight against white-collar crime. This is followed by a paper that analyzes the relationship between the exercise of discretion by regulatory officials and the control of corporate illegality through regulatory sanctions. Another paper focuses on the importance and nature of a multidisciplinary response to white-collar crime, as no one agency is capable of coping with the economic violations of economic giants whose umbrella shelters many smaller and product-independent subsidiaries. Next, a paper addresses problems of fragmentation in the implementation of white-collar crime remedies; the paper's thesis is that no major white-collar crime problem can be effectively resolved without consistent policies among the institutions connected to the problem. The concluding paper coordinates and extends the bounds of the other papers as it builds on elements of the discussion that occurred after the other papers were presented at the colloquium. Chapter notes and tables and a 361-item bibliography