Labeling Theory, Conflict Theory And Construction Of White-Collar Crime

White-collar crime is seen as a crime performed by a respectable person of high social status in one’s workplace. White-collar crime is the type of crime, the classification of which is basing on the grounds of offender’s belonging to well-educated middle or upper class being representatives of government or business. I am going to argue that elite and low class individuals who committee white-collar crimes are handle in two different ways. The elites who are running these corporations those committee white-collar offenses get prosecuted as civil cases. When you have the same crime committed from an individual of the lower class who will get treated as a criminal offense. Same crime but one is looked at as a deviant behavior, where the other one is looked at as a bad business deal. To help my argument, I am going to use labeling theory, conflict theory, construction of

I am going to discuss how individuals get labeled as criminals, and others do not. In an article by Erving Goffman he said, “The ruling class tends to dominate a society’s intellectual and ideological life, its notion of true and false, of good and bad”(1993:77). The audience who are the elite class, not the actor, determines when a certain behavior becomes defined as crime. High status individuals of the ruling class are controlling society and creating the rules. People of lower class cannot avoid the deviant label. “Consequently if often happens that the relatively powerless in a given society, the economically deprived, are more likely to have their behavior defined as deviant and are less capable of resisting an imputation of deviant than the affluent powerful”(Goode 1993:103). Individuals with low economic status that are committing the same white-collar crimes are being targeted deviant because they are powerless to oppose be labeled