Dishonest Dollars: The Dynamics Of White-collar Crime

摘要

In the foreword to his book, Terry L. Leap points out that most treatises on white-collar crime fall into one of four categories: (1) case studies of particular organizational wrongdoings, which are often journalistic, (2) criminological analyses of white-collar crimes by sociologists and criminologists, (3) economic analyses of crime in general by economists, and (4) legal case studies written for the legal community. His book falls into a fifth category, in that it has been written by a management professor who has been teaching business students about white-collar crime for several years. Following an introductory chapter, he considers basic questions in the subsequent chapters: (1) individual, organizational, and situational predictors of white-collar crime, (2) the types and facets of white-collar crime, (3) types of white-collar criminals, (4) the impact of white-collar crime, and (5) the organizational and societal responses to the crime. He describes this as a dynamic model, but readers should be forewarned that this does not mean that Professor Leap provides a flow chart with predictors and outcomes of crime other than at the most general level; he notes that the base rate for this type of crime is low, so predictive models are not appropriate. Rather, a "dynamic model" here seems to refer to lists of variables that affect the process, but with no discussion as to the weighting of the relative frequency of these variables or the pattern of the relationships among these variables.