Social reaction and white-collar crime
Since Sutherland’s work on white-collar crime, numerous studies have focused on how crimes committed by the elite are ignored by the public, the media, and public authorities. We suggest that this framework, as developed in past research, should be reassessed. After looking at major institutional and legislative reforms in the United States and Canada prompted by such crimes, we propose an integrative analytical model that challenges the popular assumption that attempts to deal with white-collar crime arise largely in reaction to scandals or other such events, arguing that legislative and institution reforms have actually been dynamic and contextualized. To illustrate the strength of our proposed framework, the third section of the article analyzes the structural roots of a recent white-collar crime scandal in Quebec’s construction industry. Inquiries into this industry found strong evidence of systemic criminal relations between elected officials, construction firms, and civil-engineering firms, including bribery, corruption, bid-rigging, and illegal political financing. We show how this scandal, along with the reforms to which it gave rise, can be explained by looking at the larger structural and contextual factors that gradually established an increased incentive to control such systemic white-collar crimes in Quebec’s construction and political spheres. Such incidents have led to an unprecedented public and institutional response, providing increasing opportunities for research in this previously neglected field of criminology.