W5: Types of Crime: Violent, Property & White-Collar

McGurrin et al./ Western Criminology Review 14(2), 3-19 (2013)

Online citation: McGurrin, Danielle, Melissa Jarrell, Amber Jahn and Brandy Cochrane.
2013. “White Collar Crime Representation in the Criminological Revisited,
2001-2010.” Western Criminology Review 14(2):3-19.
(http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v14n2/McGurrin.pdf).

White Collar Crime Representation in the Criminological
Revisited, 2001-2010

Danielle McGurrin

Portland State University

Melissa Jarrell
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Amber Jahn

Liquid Learning Group, Ltd.

Brandy Cochrane
Monash University

Abstract: This study aims to measure what changes the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice have undergone
over the past decade with respect to white collar crime representation in the criminological literature. It is well
documented in the white collar crime literature that white collar offending causes a greater number of fatalities, injuries,
and illnesses as well as greater economic losses than all street crimes combined. Nevertheless, our analysis of the contents
of 15 leading criminology and criminal justice journals from 2001-2010, 13 best-selling introductory CCJ textbooks, and
all U.S. Ph.D. granting criminology and criminal justice programs indicates that white collar crime continues to be
underrepresented in the criminological literature relative to all street crimes, similar to the findings in Lynch et al.’s 2004
study. Since then, the U.S. has experienced two unprecedented corporate crime waves, in the early part of the 2000s and in
the latter part of the decade. Implications for white collar crime representation findings are discussed within the context of
harm and crime seriousness relative to street crimes.

Keywords: corporate crime, criminological scholarship, white collar crime, white collar crime representation

INTRODUCTION
For over 20 years, white collar crime (WCC)
researchers have empirically demonstrated that white
collar crime is under-represented in the criminological and
criminal justice literature relative to traditional street
crimes (Cullen and Benson 1993; Lynch, McGurrin, and
Fenwick 2004; Rothe and Ross 2008; Shichor 2009;
Tunnell 1993; Wright 2000; Wright and Friedrichs 1991).

Despite overwhelming data demonstrating the greater loss
of life, higher injuries and illnesses, and larger economic
losses caused by white collar crimes (Coleman 2005;
Lynch et. al 2004; Moore and Mills 1990), the disciplines
of criminology and criminal justice have historically
focused their research sights to a far greater degree on
conventional crimes resulting in a sizeable imbalance
between white collar and traditional crime representation
in the criminological literature.

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http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v14n2/McGurrin.pdf

White Collar Crime Representation

This study aims to measure what changes the
disciplines of criminology and criminal justice have
undergone over the past decade with respect to white collar
crime representation in the criminological literature. To
more fully appreciate the issue of outcomes in this study
(i.e. scholarly representation), it is first necessary to
establish some of the roots that originated this imbalance,
as well as make a case for why such imbalances matter.
How crimes are operationalized, as well as data
availability, accessibility, and resource allocation are
foundational for understanding which topics receive
criminological attention and which topics are marginalized
in the discipline.

MEASURING COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES
OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME
Before proceeding to our discussion of what we know
about white collar crime data and its costs and
consequences, it is important to note that the manner in
which crimes are defined help determine how crime data
are generated. This ontological fact precedes any
examination of data collection which makes it an essential
starting point for unpacking white collar crime
measurement. With respect to criminal and civil law
making, white collar harms1 are defined under a vast
assortment of constitutional, executive, administrative
/regulatory, case, federal, and state criminal laws
(Friedrichs 2010). Both the enormity and complexity of
white collar offenses necessitate law enforcement efforts
that extend well beyond traditional federal, state, and
municipal policing capacities. This is useful to keep in
mind as we turn our attention from white collar crime law
making to law enforcement.
In the United States a relatively small number of less
serious white collar crimes are recorded annually by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports
(UCR) Program. According to the FBI, “Crimes Known to
the Police” fall into one of two categories known as Part I
and Part II offenses. The UCR’s most serious offenses
category, Part I, further distinguished between violent and
property offenses and these are selected for inclusion
based on their nature and volume. More specifically, the
rationale and ranking of Part I and II offenses are that these
are the crimes most likely to be reported to the police and
that occur with sufficient frequency for purposes of
comparison (USDOJ 2013).
Intimately related is that many (perhaps most) white
collar crime victims are unaware of their victimization, and
only infrequently report the crimes committed against
them to traditional law enforcement agencies (Friedrichs
2010). Despite the fact that white collar crimes are often
serious (causing greater loss of life, injuries, illnesses, and
economic losses than all street crimes combined) and are
committed routinely and against a broad range of the U.S.
population, governmental white collar crime (WCC) data

collection efforts have yet to reflect this reality. The
practical implication of the UCR’s encapsulation of only a
narrow range of less serious white collar crime under its
Part II offense category is that criminological research is
most commonly constrained to street crime, reifying a
distorted and incomplete picture of crime as a social
problem.
Issues regarding data availability, access, resources,
time, and other practical considerations have obvious
consequences for what, how, and why researchers choose
or are able to research given topics and not others. With
regard to the study of white collar crimes, the U.S.
Department of Justice does not have a national database
for its white collar crime statistics. Neither the FBI nor the
Bureau of Justice (BJS) currently has a central
repository for annually collecting, tracking, and reporting
on the wide variety of white collar criminal offenses and
offenders. As noted above, the FBI’s Uniform Crime
Report (UCR) Program includes Part II Offenses
administered through the National Incident-Based
Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS does collect
incident-based statistics on a very limited number of white
collar crime offenses. Principally, white collar crime arrest
data are collected on forgery/counterfeiting, fraud, bribery,
and embezzlement—offense categories largely represented
at the individual-level (Barnett 2000). However, an FBI
report (USDOJ 2011) examining the measurement
challenges with white collar offenses specified that both
the UCR and NIBRS were developed with the crime data
interests and needs of state and local law enforcement (not
researchers) in mind, and because white collar crimes
generally fall under the jurisdiction of federal agencies,
many white collar crime categories (not to speak of white
collar crime counts and rates) are not included.
Notably, organizational offenses, particularly
corporate criminal offenses and crimes committed in a
governmental context (i.e. state or state-corporate crimes)
are not generally captured in the NIBRS. Moreover,
although state participation in the NIBRS system is
growing with 32 states participating as of June 2012
(JRSA 2012), according to the FBI report noted above on
white collar crime measurement (Barnett 2000), white
collar crimes only represent a little less than four percent
of the incidents reported to the FBI. With the notable
exception of identity theft, the Bureau of Justice ’
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which
collects household and personal victimization data, does
not include white collar crime.
However, the non-profit National White-Collar Crime
Center (NW3C) does collect victimization survey data on
WCC approximately once every five years. NW3C’s
National Public Survey on White Collar Crime 2010 is the
most recent and comprehensive nation-wide survey on
WCC victimization measuring credit card fraud, price
misrepresentation, unnecessary repairs, monetary losses
(internet), identity theft, fraudulent business ventures, false

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stockbroker information, and mortgage fraud. According
to this survey, nearly one in four households (24 percent)
and one in six individuals (17 percent) experienced an
average of 1.3 WCC victimizations during 2010 (Huff,
Desilets, and Kane 2011). Huff et al. (2011) assert that
there is strong evidence from the Federal Trade
Commission (whose consumer protection charge involves
“preventing fraud, deception, and unfair business practices
in the marketplace”), that such victimizations may be on
the rise.
As one example, the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) documented a 27 percent increase in consumer
complaints between 2007-2009 involving fraud, identity
theft, and other crimes against consumers. And, in just
2009 alone, Huff et al. (2011) note that 1.9 million
complaints were filed through the FTC’s Consumer
Sentinel database with total losses of more than $1.7
billion to victims. It remains to be seen whether a
successful integration of resources and data sharing
between the FTC and the newly formed Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau will yield greater overall
reporting in this area and whether this will improve overall
data collection and protection for crimes against
consumers.
Returning to the topic of capturing an overall measure
of white collar crime, in the absence of systematic, annual
governmental collection efforts, white collar crime
researchers (as evidenced above) rely upon an enormous
patchwork of data to locate, analyze, and interpret the
frequency and scope with which white collar crimes are
committed, as well as attempt to uncover the costs,
consequences, and control of these crimes. In addition to
the data sources already noted, white collar crime data
resources include periodic governmental reports,
university sourcebook and archival data, regulatory agency
enforcement databases, non-profit databases, and case
studies, to name a few. While these source categories
provide vital data on selected white collar offense types,
neither independently nor collectively do they provide
even a near complete accounting of all white collar crime
types. Despite the lack of a national database allowing for
a more systematic measurement of white collar crime,
even narrowly defined offense categories show evidence of
overwhelming harm and expense by its perpetrators.
With respect to economic losses, the FBI and the
American Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
estimate financial losses from white collar crimes to be
between $300 and $600 billion annually (Kane and Wall
2006). When one considers that in the early 2000s a mere
five, albeit giant corporations (Enron, WorldCom, Qwest,
Tyco and Global Crossing) committed financial frauds
resulting in estimated losses of approximately $460 billion
(Rezaee 2005), it is likely that annual financial losses from
white collar crime are even greater than the above
estimates.

Since 2005, the FBI, in its Financial Crimes Report to the
Public, has been providing aggregate summary reports on
financial crimes, including corporate, securities and
commodities, financial institution, mortgage, health care,
insurance, and mass marketing frauds. Unfortunately, the
FBI only lists case counts and recovery/restitution statistics
for these financial crime categories; estimates of actual
economic losses resulting from white collar crimes in each
category are not included in the FCRP. Still, the FBI does
provide targeted reports on economic losses for a small
number of white collar criminal law violations. Selecting
just two of these white collar crime types illustrate the
massive economic losses resulting from these illegal acts.
According to the FBI, non-health care related insurance
industry fraud cost nearly $30 billion in annual losses in
2011 (USDOJ 2012). Mortgage fraud limited to loans
originating from fraudulent loan application data cost $10
billion in 2010 (USDOJ n.d.) By comparison, the FBI’s
Crimes in the U.S. 2010 report an estimated $15.7 billion
in losses from all property crimes (USDOJ 2011).
With respect to physical harms caused by white collar
crimes, Burns, Lynch, and Stretestky (2008) report that
about 85 percent of the U.S. population is exposed to toxic
air pollution each year, ten times greater than the number
of individuals victimized by conventional crimes.
According to the Earth Policy Institute (Fischlowitz-
Roberts 2002), air pollution alone kills nearly 70,000
persons in the U.S. annually. In a national investigative
report by the Hearst Corporation (2009) on patient safety
and medical related deaths, the researchers found that
nearly 200,000 Americans die each year due to preventable
medical errors and preventable hospital-acquired
infections. In the realm of worker safety and health, 4,690
American workers were killed on the job in 2010 by
occupational injuries, and an additional three million
workers were injured or became ill from occupational
diseases in 2011 (USDOL 2012). Once again, by
comparison, according to the FBI’s Crimes in the U.S.
2010 report, an estimated 14,748 persons were murdered
in 2010 (USDOJ 2011).
The data above highlight two chief points often
asserted by white collar crime researchers: one, the data
gaps due to the absence of a national white collar crime
database or sourcebook is likely quite large with
undercounting difficult to estimate, and two, despite these
massive data gaps, there is overwhelming evidence to
support the fact that collectively white collar crimes cause
greater physical and financial harms than conventional
street crimes.

THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WHITE
COLLAR CRIME RESEARCH
With the understanding that scholarly attention to a
given topic can have meaningful consequences ranging
from the dissemination of knowledge in the classroom to

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White Collar Crime Representation

future CCJ professionals and researchers, to impacting
relevant public policy decision-making, to outcomes borne
by communities, citizens, and the environment, many
white collar crime researchers have studied the subfield’s
representation.
The first study to identify this trend of white collar
crime underrepresentation was conducted by Wright and
Friedrichs (1991). The authors examined white collar
crime coverage in introductory criminology and criminal
justice (CCJ) textbooks and course offerings in criminal
justice programs. The purpose of their study was twofold.
First, the authors aimed to discover whether coverage of
white collar crime, in comparison to street crime, had
increased between 1956-1965 and 1981-1990 in the
textbooks examined (n=70). Second, Wright and
Friedrichs (1991) examined whether there had been an
increase in white collar crime course offerings, in
comparison to women and crime and comparative CCJ
courses, in the surveyed departments between the years
1986 (n=782) and 1991 (n=943). In their findings, the
authors concluded that while white collar crime coverage
had increased in textbooks and course offerings over the
study years, the topics of both white collar crime and
women and crime made much smaller inroads compared to
comparative criminology and criminal justice. Moreover,
they found that white collar crime courses lagged behind
both comparative CCJ and women and crime courses in
their 1991 data. The publication of this study provided a
catalyst for future white collar crime representation
scholarship over the next two decades.
Two more studies examining white collar crime
representation were published in the early 1990s. Cullen
and Benson (1993) published a content analysis study
specifically looking at the criminal justice curriculum and
the prevalence of courses dealing with white collar crime.
Their findings were consistent with those of Wright and
Friedrichs (1991). The authors concurred that there was a
lack of white collar crime representation in comparison to
other criminal justice courses. Next, Tunnell (1993)
analyzed introductory CCJ textbooks published in the
1970s (n=11) and in or after 1980 (n=38). Through a
qualitative and quantitative content analysis looking
specifically at the coverage dedicated to a sub-type of
white collar crime, political crime, Tunnell demonstrated
that in comparison to mainstream criminological topics,
political crime was nearly absent in the criminal justice
textbooks (0.05 percent) and scarcely represented in the
criminology textbooks (2.7 percent).
The 2000s brought an additional set of white collar
crime representation articles that illustrated similar trends
to the studies conducted in the 1990s. Wright (2000)
delved deeper into the content of introductory criminology
textbooks (n=34), published between 1990 and 1999, by
examining their coverage of critical and radical
perspectives, as these perspectives often inform white
collar crime scholarship. Findings concluded that while the

amount of pages dedicated to the two perspectives varied
between texts, on average, the topics received only 27.8
devoted pages. However, Wright noted that this number
was highly skewed by a small sample of textbooks printing
more pages dedicated to the critical and radical
perspectives than other textbooks. As before, the pattern
of white collar crime under-representation in the CCJ
literature remained consistent a decade after it was
originally identified by Wright and Friedrichs in 1991.
Lynch et al. (2004) expanded the study of white collar
crime representation further in 2004 by incorporating three
facets of the criminological field into their study: CCJ
journals (n=8), introductory CCJ textbooks (n=16), and
CCJ doctoral programs (n=21). Not surprisingly, their
findings demonstrated that white collar crime
representation was minimal in each category. For example,
only 3.6 percent of the 1,118 journal articles collected
focused upon white collar crime. Similarly, the coverage
of white collar crime that appeared in their examination of
CCJ textbooks (4.5 percent) and doctoral programs that
required a white collar crime course (0 percent) ranged
from minimal to non-existent.
In 2008, Rothe and Ross revisited Tunnell’s 1993
research by examining eight leading introductory
criminology textbooks for coverage of state crime. Like
Tunnell’s finding 15 years earlier, they found no evidence
of increased coverage. Specifically, Rothe and Ross (2008)
found that none of the texts incorporated the topic of state
crime within the broader category of white collar crime or
as an independent field of study; no texts included a
review of the state crime literature; and no text included a
theoretical framework for understanding and explaining
the causes, correlates, dynamics and other components of
state crime.
A year later, Shichor (2009) published an article
specifically looking at how frequently white collar crime
topics and researchers were cited in criminology and
criminal justice introductory textbooks and academic
journals. He concluded that compared to traditional street
crime and its researchers, the coverage of white collar
crime and its researchers was highly disproportionate.
Shichor’s study called attention not only to the under-
representation of white collar crime in criminological
scholarship, but the overall under-representation of white
collar crime scholars in the field, as well.
As a more critical approach to studying crime, WCC
scholars owe a large intellectual debt to the early works of
American conflict and later radical criminologists
including William Chambliss, Richard Quinney, Julia and
Herman Schwendinger, Anthony Platt, and Paul Takagi, to
name a prominent few. Their recognition and
understanding of the political economy of crime, which
emerged most decidedly in the famed Berkeley School of
Criminology marked an important turning point for the
discipline of criminology in the late 1960s. Later
generations of radical, critical, and integrative

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criminological scholars continue to advance this tradition
(e.g. Barak 2009, 1998; Braithwaite 2008; Croall 2001;
Lynch 2005; Michalowski and Kramer 2006), and their
work has important theoretical utility for both the study
and control of white collar crime.
Returning to the current study, we employ Barak’s
(2009, 1998:12) theoretical premise that disciplinary
structures help produce and construct our worlds just as the
models of what and how we research or investigate give
shape to how we view our worlds. Following this line of
reasoning, Barak (1998) argues that criminology [like any
academic discipline] is inextricably linked with the
dominant societal values of which it is a part. Barak (1998)
continues that the development of criminological research
evolved with the influence of particular disciplines,
incorporating some types of knowledge while excluding
others. These vestiges from early in the development of
both criminology and criminal justice can be seen by the
theoretical influences of foundational “roots” disciplines
like biology, psychology, sociology, and law for example.
However, disciplines outside this core (e.g. heterodox
economics, industrial labor, environmental science, to
name a few) are very infrequently incorporated into either
criminological theorizing or analysis to integrate a more
holistic body of CCJ scholarship. Perhaps the disciplinary
tendency to focus more narrowly on its historical roots and
traditional research areas (as supported in multiple ways
by governmental policies and CCJ history, culture, and
practices), might explain why even extreme external
events outside the knowledge core might not be sufficient
to dramatically alter either criminological research
endeavors or the representation of criminology and
criminal justice topics in the literature. Even though the
U.S. has experienced two unprecedented corporate crime
waves, in the early part of the 2000s and in the latter part
of the decade, we hypothesize that white collar crime
research continues to be under-represented in
criminological scholarship as well as textbooks and Ph.D.
programs.

DATA AND METHODS
This study examines the representation of white collar
crime in 15 leading criminology and criminal justice
journals, 13 introductory textbooks, and all criminology
and criminal justice doctoral programs in the United
States. In establishing the rationale for our current study,
we wanted to answer two essential research questions
about white collar crime representation in the
criminological literature. Firstly, compared to traditional
criminological topics, how frequently are white collar
crime topics represented in criminology and criminal
justice journals, textbooks, and Ph.D. programs? Secondly,
over the past ten years, that is, the first decade of the
2000s, how has white collar crime representation in CCJ
journals, textbooks, and doctoral programs changed?

The methodological approach we employed in the
current study for the non-white collar crime articles was to
adopt the same keyword search strategy used in the Lynch
et al. (2004) study2. After carefully examining the
thousands of journal articles, table of contents, and indices
in the journals and textbooks selected, we found that these
major topics continued to be important staples of the
criminological literature and therefore appropriate for
inclusion in the current study. We coded non-white collar
crime articles as criminal law violations (index crimes,3
domestic violence/intimate partner violence, hate crimes,
terrorism, international-crimes-non-white collar, and
cybercrimes-non-white collar), criminal lifestyles (drugs,
DUI/DWI, guns, gangs), demographics (race/ethnicity,
gender, age), representation/perception of crime, criminal
justice system/administration (policing, courts, and
corrections), and researching criminal behavior (theory,
methods, statistical analysis).
For the white collar crime article and text coding, we
expanded the approach by Lynch et al. (2004) by
employing David Friedrichs’s (2010) white collar crime
typologies as elucidated in his seminal white collar crime
text, Trusted Criminals.4 White collar crimes were coded
as corporate, enterprise/contrepreneurial, governmental
/state-corporate, occupational, and white collar crime
theory. Articles that did not fit into any of the above
categories were coded as “other.”
Although there is some debate as to the most
appropriate definition of “white collar crime,” we utilized
the definition set forth by fifteen white collar crime
scholars at a 1996 National White Collar Crime meeting.
White collar crime refers to “illegal or unethical acts that
violate fiduciary responsibility of public trust committed
by an individual or organization, usually during the course
of legitimate occupational activity, by persons of high or
respectable social status for personal or organizational
gain” (Helmkamp, Ball, and Townsend 1996:351). As
noted above, articles coded as white collar crime were sub-
categorized using Friedrichs’ (2010:7) core typologies in
Trusted Criminals. Corporate crime refers to illegal and
harmful acts committed by corporate officers or employees
to promote corporate and personal interests.5
Enterprise/contrepreneurial white collar crime refers
to two distinct but related typologies. Enterprise crimes
refer to offenses involving cooperative syndicated and
business activities, and contrepreneurial crimes are used to
describe a hybrid of traditional professional crime and
entrepreneurial activities (Friedrichs 2010:7).
Governmental and state-corporate crimes are also two
distinct but related white collar crime categories.
Governmental crime is an umbrella term that includes both
activities committed on behalf of governments by agencies
and officers of the government (i.e., state crime) and by
government officials for their own enrichment (i.e.,
political white collar crime). State-corporate crime refers
to white collar crimes committed by governments in

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collusion with the corporation(s) or its organizational
entities (Friedrichs 2010:7). And, occupational crime
refers to illegal and unethical activity committed within the
context of a legitimate occupation (2010:7). Articles
related specifically to advancing or testing theory were
coded as White Collar Crime Theory. And, articles that
could not be uniquely classified/captured under the five
broad white collar crime categories above were coded as
white collar crime-other.

Journal Articles

In order to assess the representation of white collar
crime in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) journals,
we selected fifteen CCJ journals (Appendix A). The
majority of these journals, particularly the top ten journals,
are consistently recognized as the top criminology and
criminal justice journals from prestige surveys (Sorensen
et al. 2006), and Institute for Scientific Information (now
Thompson Reuters) impact factor-based assessments
(Science Watch 2009; Sorensen et al. 2009). Most of these
journals were employed in previous criminological citation
research and were also included in the most recent white
collar crime citation study (Lynch et al. 2004).
In addition to the highest ranked journals, we also
included two critically-oriented journals (Social Justice
and Crime, and Social Change) to assess whether
white collar crime scholarship was included or excluded to
a similar extent in both traditional and critical criminology
and criminal justice journals. We included a second major
international CCJ journal (Canadian Journal of
Criminology and Criminal Justice) to assess whether white
collar crime representation differences existed among top
American, British, and Canadian CCJ journals. An added
rationale for including critical and international journals in
our study was to include all eight of the journals used in
Lynch et al.’s (2004) white collar and corporate crime
representation study. Data collection in these 15 journals
consisted of scholarly articles published from 2001 to
2010, representing ten years of CCJ scholarship (n=4,878
articles). Full-text articles were collected from a university
online library database. When journals were not available
in the university database, articles were collected from the
journal’s website.
For each full-text article, the following information
was collected: journal name, title, author(s), …