Organizational offending and neoclassical criminology: Challenging the reach of a general theory of crime

This article examines and critiques Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime, with particular respect to its applicability to organizational offending We question their views that the theory is adequately general and that typologies of crime are therefore unnecessary for criminological theory. Gottfredson and Hirschi have employed the case of white-collar crime to support their arguments, but they have constrained the test of their theory by focusing on the white-collar offenses that most resemble conventional crime. When organizational offending is included in white-collar crime, empirical and theoretical limitations of their project emerge. These limitations include the matters of defining and counting the phenomena of interest, the nature of the interest that commonly underlies them, and the role of opportunity in them. A satisfactory theory of organizational offending requires an adequate account of all these matters and will look substantially different from Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime.