The Reaction Towards White Collar Crime: When White Collar Crime Matters

ABSTRACT

In the present article, we analyze socio-demographic profiles regarding wrongful attitudes toward white-collar crime. This is a well-researched area, however where the vast majority of the studies comes from the USA and UK. In this paper we will investigate wrongful attitudes in a different context – Sweden. We will furthermore not only focus on those having a restricted view of white collar crime, but also people with a liberal view, i.e. people who do not consider white collar crime to be seriously wrong. To identify different groups regarding attitudes towards white collar crime we have used Latent Class Analyses, with the result that we can identify four different groups, among which we focus on a large group (containing 35 % of the sample) having the most restricted view of white collar crime, and a small group (4.5 % of the sample) having the most liberal view of white collar crime. The socio-demographic profile of people having a re-stricted view of white collar crime is quite similar to the previous research. The restricted group consists in general of eld-erly women that infrequently uses Internet. The liberal group is in great extent an opposite group – containing young men regularly using Internet. We conclude that it is the latter group that is of most interest for future research, not the least be-cause it is a group that may be breeding general distrust, which may strain the society's social solidarity and trustfulness.

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