Review Symposium: Respectable Citizens—Shady Practices: The Economic Morality of the Middle Classes

Abstract

Emile Durkheim (1938 [1895]) famously argued that crime is normal and exists in all societies, indeed even in a society of saints, because it is needed to establish and clarify the moral boundaries of behaviour. But exactly how much crime and of what sort societies can tolerate before becoming dysfunctional is debatable (Moynihan 1993). These ideas, which I first encountered many years ago in a seminar on sociological theory, came back to me as I was reading this thought-provoking and meticulous monograph by Farrall and Karstedt. Focusing on such seemingly trivial ‘crimes’ as a customer not returning a couple of dollars when a shopkeeper makes a mistake in counting change, or a policyholder inflating an insurance claim, or a store selling inferior food products may seem to many traditional criminologists, including those who study white-collar crime, a waste of time. After all, how can such peccadillos be considered in the same conceptual ballpark as murder or assault, or the billion-dollar frauds of investment bankers, or the illegal poisoning of waterways by corrupt manufacturers? To their credit, Farrall and Karstedt do not argue that these middle-class crimes, or as they sometimes call them crimes of everyday life, are similar to ordinary street crimes or high-level corporate crimes in regard to traditional measures of seriousness (physical harm, dollars lost and emotional trauma). They do show, however, that there appears to be quite a lot of this sort of crime, that it varies geographically, that victimization and offending rates are influenced by social, demographic, and economic variables, and that, like other forms of crime, there is considerable overlap between victims and offenders.