The Inaugural Issue of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime

Abstract

The agenda for the first business session of the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime (DWCC) held in Atlanta during the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in November 2017 included the subject of establishing a journal devoted exclusively to the study of white collar and corporate crime. Of some 100 persons in attendance, the vast majority thought that the time had come or was past due for launching this project. Support for the creation of this journal was not unequivocal. There were other points of view, including from three high-profile white collar and corporate crime scholars-David Friedrichs, Henry Pontell, and Sally Simpson-concerning the viability of a journal that could compete with and take away from the existing outlets, sustaining itself, ultimately, as the go-to or flagship journal for publishing research on the crimes of the powerful. As cofounding editors, we also duly acknowledge the reality that even with the ongoing expansion and development of both white collar and corporate crime studies, there is more than ample evidence to reinforce any pessimistic concerns about the sustainability of this journal. On balance, the number of criminologists conducting research in this area is relatively small as is the collective production and distribution of our criminological knowledge. Consistent with an earlier study by Lynch, McGurrin, and Fenwick (2004), McGurrin, Jarrell, Jahn, and Cochrane (2013) found that from 2001 to 2010, the study of white collar crime compared to the study of street crime constituted roughly 5% of the total content represented in 15 leading criminology and criminal justice journals, 13 best-selling introductory C&CJ textbooks, and all PhD granting criminology and criminal justice programs in the United States. Yet, the actual number of publications worldwide in the areas of white collar and corporate crime turns out to be substantial. For example, a search conducted as part of developing the proposal for this journal discovered that between 2006 and 2016, there were at least 2,738 articles published in the areas of white collar and corporate crime. Following the business meeting of the DWCC held in Atlanta, the executive board consisting of Kristy Holtfreter, chair, Carole Gibbs, vice chair, and three executive counselors, Gregg Barak, Melissa Rorie, and David Friedrichs, voted unanimously to pursue a new journal and assigned the task of developing the proposal to Barak. The executive board also agreed

Carceral Experiences of White-Collar Offenders: Qualitative Research Design Utilising the Offender-Based Definition and Pierre Bourdieu’s Capital Theory

“…In response to the increasing number of white-collar offenders in prison, several studies on the subject were conducted in the United States and Great Britain that applied both quantitative (Stadler et al 2013;Crank & Payne 2015;) and qualitative methodologies (Benson & Cullen 1988;Hunter 2012Hunter , 2015Button et al 2020). This emerging academic interest in convicted whitecollar offenders can be linked not only to the emerging criminology of white-collar crime as an established subdiscipline with dedicated handbooks and journals (Friedrichs 2011;Alvesalo-Kuusi & Barak 2020), but also to certain developments within prison research, which has recently dedicated more attention to the distinctive experiences of subgroups of inmates as various as, for instance, the elderly, former soldiers, and LGBT+ individuals (Mann 2016;Logan and Pare, 2017;Maycock, 2021).…”

Challenging Existing Regulatory Approaches for White-Collar and Corporate Crimes

“…The regulation of crimes and harms occurring at the statecorporate nexus presents ongoing challenges across political systems, markets, and organisations. Thus, a core goal of the Journal of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (JWCCC) is to support new socio-legal and political interventions through targeted policy change and critique (Alvesalo-Kuusi & Barak, 2020), and by embracing proposals to regulate and prevent white-collar and corporate crime from a multidisciplinary background (see for instance Gottschalk, 2021;Mulinari et al, 2021). Notably, experts across disciplines vary in their ideological and methodological approaches to studies of corporate activity and processes of corporate regulation, which span from consensus approaches to conflict driven strategies (Whyte, 2004).…”