SOC 014 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Deviant Behavior: White-Collar Crime, Corporate Crime, Hierarchical Organization

• School: University of Vermont
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 014
• Professor: Lutz F Kaelber

Document Summary

Corporate swindlers are wildly exceptional and very far from the rule: most white-collar crime perpetrators commit their acts behind closed doors by means of actions that we wouldn"t immediately detect as criminal. Both conventional theft and white-collar crimes are petty affairs, but the sums that white collar crime entails are larger than what all of the conventional thieves steal added together in a single year. Public is aware of white-collar criminals and understands the central point of corporate criminality, that it is profitable but rarely risky and only rarely does the offender get caught. The agency of most deviant acts that we have looked at so far can be traced to a single individual within a larger environment. The focus of the origin of judgments of deviance is on individual: all individuals in society or designated with respect to the deviance or conventionality of their beliefs and their mental condition.