White-Collar Deviance
White-Collar Deviance
John O. Temple Jr.
SOC 443
Christina Scott
November 2011
White-Collar Deviance
So what is white-collar crime?
According to the Meridian-Webster dictionary the word white is a stereotypical association of good character, marked by upright fairness, free from spot or blemish, free from moral impurity , innocent, marked by the wearing of white by the woman as a symbol of purity, not intended to cause harm, a white lie, favorable, fortunate. And there is the infamous cliché, “that’s mighty white of you.”[1] This leads to the question; does the American society; look at white-collar crime the same way as they do street crime? During a recent class at a University in California a Sociology professor while tackling the subject of white-collar crime, asked her class a relative simple question but complex. After viewing the film Office Space, the students were asked, “Was there a correlation in the film with Bill Lumbergh, a top level executive, and his “white” collar?” The professor wanted to know if the exaggerated whiteness of Bill’s collar was a deliberate action on the director’s part. Certainly this would fall with-in the Meridian-Webster Dictionary’s definition, if the director was trying to portray the actor to look like, the fair, up right, good character, corporate white-collar image type. Or perhaps the director was implying this is how the average American views top level, white-collar executives, in society. Here is where the issue becomes complex, the white-collar crime in the movie should be committed by the executive than, right? This is part of the problem dealing with the growing phenomenon of what is known as white-collar crime and the trend is growing and not going away any time soon.
There was no official classification of what a white-collar crime was in America until 1939. The only way social scientist were able to track any sort of deviance in higher society was to look at the Uniform Crime Report
John O. Temple Jr.
SOC 443
Christina Scott
November 2011
White-Collar Deviance
So what is white-collar crime?
According to the Meridian-Webster dictionary the word white is a stereotypical association of good character, marked by upright fairness, free from spot or blemish, free from moral impurity , innocent, marked by the wearing of white by the woman as a symbol of purity, not intended to cause harm, a white lie, favorable, fortunate. And there is the infamous cliché, “that’s mighty white of you.”[1] This leads to the question; does the American society; look at white-collar crime the same way as they do street crime? During a recent class at a University in California a Sociology professor while tackling the subject of white-collar crime, asked her class a relative simple question but complex. After viewing the film Office Space, the students were asked, “Was there a correlation in the film with Bill Lumbergh, a top level executive, and his “white” collar?” The professor wanted to know if the exaggerated whiteness of Bill’s collar was a deliberate action on the director’s part. Certainly this would fall with-in the Meridian-Webster Dictionary’s definition, if the director was trying to portray the actor to look like, the fair, up right, good character, corporate white-collar image type. Or perhaps the director was implying this is how the average American views top level, white-collar executives, in society. Here is where the issue becomes complex, the white-collar crime in the movie should be committed by the executive than, right? This is part of the problem dealing with the growing phenomenon of what is known as white-collar crime and the trend is growing and not going away any time soon.
There was no official classification of what a white-collar crime was in America until 1939. The only way social scientist were able to track any sort of deviance in higher society was to look at the Uniform Crime Report
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