t prestigious; nevertheless, the concept is valuable for two reasons: (1) it enables a distinction between business and street crime; and (2) it acknowledges that crime is not confined to the lower classes (p. 394).
It is important to note that "business crime" or "white-collar crime" are misnomers as far as some criminologists are concerned. Gomme (1993) states their belief that "many white-collar crimes are not really crimes at all, but activities that large numbers of merchants, professionals, and business merchants consider 'sharp' business practices that are at worst unethical. Unless the law specifically prohibits certain tactics, these critics say, they cannot be called crimes" (p. 394).
Gomme (1993) notes, "in white-collar or professional crime, high-status workers engage in violations directly for their own benefit" (p. 395). In contrast, corporate crime "involves employees carrying out corporate illegalities on behalf of the corporation and in accordance with formally specified corporate goals" (Gomme, 1993, p. 395). In his "Corporate Punishment," Daniel Farber (1989), a law professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, maintains that many white-collar crimes are committed on behalf of corporations--that corporations should be punished for crimes by putting them on probation or by imposing stiff fines. He cites the frustrtion of an English judge two centuries ago who lamented that a corporation "has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked" (p. 174). In an era of insider trading and Pentagon scandals, the problem is more pressing than ever. When a corporation violates the law, how is it to be punished?
The theory of differential association, originally outlined by Edwin Sutherland in the 1940s, is one of the most influential and popular explanatory frameworks in the sociology of deviance. As Gomme (1993) explains, "Sutherland suggests that some social groups possess pro-criminal traditi...