Observations on European White-Collar Crime Scholarship from the United States

This essay examines the distinctiveness of white-collar crime scholarship from the perspective of an academic located in the United States. Drawing on personal experiences and a review of white-collar crime articles published in 21 peer-reviewed criminology/sociology journals over a 14-month period, the author finds that traditional assumptions about white-collar crime research as a generally American endeavour are no longer accurate. In fact, European white-collar crime scholarship is overrepresented compared to other regions of the world, although the veneration of quantitative methods over qualitative methods often means that European scholarship is left out of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which purport to assess the state of research. This neglect is much to the detriment of the field. All consumers of white-collar crime scholarship would benefit from efforts to delve into the European perspective, but American white-collar crime scholars in particular would benefit greatly by looking to organizations like the European Working Group on Organizational Crime (EUROC) for opportunities to network with these scholars.