Tage Alalehto

Economic Crime: Does Personality Matter?

Since the publication of Edwin Sutherlands classical study, White Collar Crime, personality has been treated as completely irrelevant as a cause or as a correlating variable in studies of economic crime. This article questions that thesis. In an ongoing Swedish project studying economic crime in the areas of construction, engineering, and the music industry, 128 informants were interviewed regarding the personal character of the economic criminal compared to that of the law-abiding businessperson. Data were collected from five different regions in Sweden using the Big Five model, the personality model most often used within the field of personality research today. This article compares the results from the interviews with the few international studies that exist regarding economic crimes in these areas and common results are emphasized. It also presents nuanced analyses of the significance of personality in economic crime.

White Collar Criminals : the State of Knowledge

White collar crime is the least studied and the least understood crime type in comparison to traditional crime types. This review highlights the recent developments in the state of knowledge over t ...

The Sutherland tradition in criminology: a bibliometric story

In this article, we provide an overview of the body of knowledge associated with the Sutherland tradition in criminology. We track Sutherland’s impact through a bibliometric analysis of papers citing any of Sutherland’s works and by focusing on publications that are co-cited with Sutherland. This approach enables us to visualize Sutherland’s role in relation to the forerunners and founding fathers of criminology during his own active period, to his followers, and to contemporary scholars. The dataset consisted of 2596 genuine articles that cite at least one of Sutherland’s publications, in which he appears as first author in Web of Science TM published between 1955 and 2010. The results show a clear impact of the Sutherland tradition more or less throughout the twentieth century, peaking during the 1930s and 1940s and decreasing in the 1990s, when the Sutherland tradition was more powerfully challenged, primarily by the life-course tradition.

The Reaction Towards White Collar Crime: When White Collar Crime Matters

In the present article, we analyze socio-demographic profiles regarding wrongful attitudes toward white-collar crime. This is a well-researched area, however where the vast majority of the studies ...

White Collar Crime : A Propositional Logical Analysis of a Concept

In their book White-Collar Crime – An Opportunity Perspective (2009), Benson and Simpson undertake the task of more precisely denoting the concept of white-collar crime by its nature and how the ca ...

The Origin of White Collar Criminality? – Exploring a Gene x Environment Interaction Hypothesis

The aim for this article is the elementary question: why does white collar criminals become white collar criminals? The answer is a hypothetical syllogistic constructed hypothesis for further empir ...

The wealthy white‐collar criminals: corporations as offenders

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top-ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for companies t ...