Organized and corporate crime in Europe: offers that can't be refused

Abstract

The first chapter discusses Edwin Sutherland's contribution to the study of white-collar crime and analyzes the extent to which his writings embryonically contain a distinction between corporate and organized crime. The discussion also focuses on the way in which subsequent criminologists contributed to crystallizing this distinction. Chapter 2 performs a similar exercise with respect to conventional organized crime and concludes that the two forms of offending should be analyzed jointly. Some categories that allow for this joint analysis are derived from the theory of organizations and the theory of the firm. Chapter 3 addresses the examination and selection of such categories and theories; and the fourth chapter discusses cases of white-collar and corporate crime that have occurred in European countries, using the definitions and theories provided in the previous chapter. A similar discussion is provided in chapter 5, in which specific activities performed by organized crime are examined through the theories of organizations and the firm. Chapter 6 concludes the joint analysis of corporate and organized crime in Europe by describing cases in which these two types of offending occurred simultaneously. Based on the tautology that corporate actors and organized criminals sometimes commit crime together, this chapter again presents the case for a joint analysis of the two types of criminality and identifies encounters between licit and illicit economies.