referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2006-03-13 13:11:00 |
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| Entry tags: | business, criminal justice |
Encyclopedia of White-Collar and Corporate Crime
Encyclopedia of White-Collar and Corporate Crime
Lawrence M. Salinger, Ph.D., General Editor.
Published by SAGE, 2005.
This is a work in two 9" by 11" hardbound volumes that run to a total of 974 pages including the index and appendices, plus an introduction, a reader's guide, a timeline, list of contributors, and a list of articles. The volumes are laid out in large type in two columns.
The first sentence in the introduction is: "In the 2000's, white-collar crime has become a topic of almost daily news." Depite the overshadowing news of the September 11th, 2001, the Enron scandal was big enough to have a lasting effect on the way our culture thinks about corporate America. This reference work is a result of that.
The entries cover people, companies, laws, and convictions. The editor acknowledges that not everything that could be considered a white-collar crime has been included. I notice a pattern, however, in that violent crimes by corporations are generally omitted. This could include such things as violence against protesters (to the point of killing) in Africa by oil company-employed paramilitaries and violence against striking union members by thugs employed by strikebreaking law firms throughout American labor history. This reinforces the misperception that crimes by corporations all involve manipulation of numbers and documents (which can be harmful enough to real people). They mostly do involve documents, but they can also involve blood and broken limbs. The book also shies away from cases where the record shows clear guilt, but because of corruption the criminals managed to avoid conviction, as well as practices that are technically legal but morally offensive to society to the point of inspiring new policy developments.
That said, this resource has a lot of great information in it on white-collar crime. Here is the full list of entries in the "E" sequence, which is one of the shorter sequences:
- E. F. Hutton
- Eastern Europe
- Economic Espionage
- Edelhertz, Herbert
- Eisenhower, Dwight D.
- Eli Lilly
- Elite Crime
- Embezzlement
- Employee Crimes
- Employee Safey
- Enron Corporation
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Equity Funding Scandal
- Ethics
- Ethics Reform Act
- Extortion
- Exxon Valdez
Entries are informative, well-written, and signed by the contributor responsible. One strength of the book is the extensive provision of legal citations relating to specific cases.
This is a good and welcome reference book overall, but would be better if the editor had more courage to risk controversy.
