NCJ Number
147096
Journal
Crime, Law, and Social Change Volume: 20 Issue: 4 Dated: special issue (December 1993) Pages: 319-337
Date Published
1993
Length
19 pages
Annotation
While most Western criminologists have ignored the problem of small business crime, there are at least four reasons to engage in a serious investigation: the high costs of small business crime, the impact of the shadow economy, commonalities between legitimate and illegitimate enterprises, and the paucity of small business research in criminology.
Abstract
Several analyses have focused on how different occupational structures facilitate or inhibit particular types of workplace crime, and have demonstrated that the attitudes of workers may support routinization of those illegal activities facilitated by the occupational structure in which they work. One important feature of the criminogenic environment of small business crime is the networks of collusion that organize and promote criminal enterprise. Research has provided evidence of the extensiveness of urban crime and the overlapping of compliance and crime. This author argues that autobiographical accounts of involvement in criminal networks by participating small businessmen will be the tool most helpful in understanding this neglected area of criminological research. The article concludes with a few excerpts from the autobiographical account of a small businessman that illustrate how he became involved in a criminal network, how his criminal activity escalated, how the network extended past its inner circle, and how the network eventually collapsed. 33 references