Michael L. Benson is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and Chair of the Division of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime. In 2017, he received the Gilbert Geis Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime of the American Society of Criminology. The third edition of his book White‐Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective, co‐authored with Sally S. Simpson, was published in 2018.

Ignasi Bernat has been a lecturer at the University of Girona and the University of Surrey. His research and teaching interests are focused on corporate crime and colonial regimes of power. He is currently working at the Spanish National Distance University (UNED).

Steven Bittle is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His research and teaching interests include crimes of the powerful, corporate crime, corporate criminal liability, safety crimes, and the sociology of law. He is the co‐editor (with Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, and David Whyte) of Revisiting Crimes of the Powerful: Marxism, Crime and Deviance.

Ronald G. Burns is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas Christian University (TCU). He has published over 75 articles and eight books in areas including white‐collar crime, school violence, multiculturalism in the criminal justice system, and the criminal justice system. He graduated from Florida State University in 1997 and has been at TCU ever since.

George W. Burruss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. His main research interests focus on criminal justice organizations, cybercrime, and white‐collar crime. He received his doctorate in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Bryan Burton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies at Sonoma State University. His work covers white‐collar and corporate crime, healthcare fraud and abuse (particularly in Medicare and Medicaid), healthcare regulation, and criminological theory.

Fiona Chan is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Formerly a public accountant specializing in external audit, her research interests focus on financial fraud and other forms of corporate and white‐collar crime. She currently holds a BS and MS in accountancy from Miami University and an MS in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati.

Hei Lam Chio is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests focus on white‐collar crime, spatial analysis, and crime prevention.

Cecilia Chouhy is an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology & Criminal Justice in Florida State University. She received her PhD in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2016. Her main research interests include national and international studies of criminological theories, assessing the effectiveness of correctional interventions, and exploring different sources of public opinion. Her writings have appeared in different edited books and peer‐reviewed journals.

Mark A. Cohen is the Justin Potter Professor of American Competitive Enterprise and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Much of his research focuses on the economics of crime and justice, including the cost of crime and understanding corporate criminal behavior and punishment. He previously served as senior research economist at the US Sentencing Commission and as Chairman of the American Statistical Association's Committee on Law and Justice. He received his PhD in economics from Carnegie‐Mellon University.

Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is author of Corporate Crime Under Attack: The Fight to Criminalize Business Violence, Combating Corporate Crime: Local Prosecutors at Work, and The Oxford Handbook of White‐Collar Crime. He is a past President of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Mary Dodge earned her PhD in 1997 in criminology, law and society from the University of California, Irvine. She is a Professor at the University of Colorado Denver in the School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include women in the criminal justice system, white‐collar crime, policing, prostitution, and courts. Along with Gilbert Geis, she co‐edited the book Lessons of Criminology and wrote Stealing Dreams: A Fertility Clinic Scandal. She also authored the 2009 book Women and White‐Collar Crime.

Ifeanyi Ezeonu is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. He has research interests in and has published on market criminology, organized crimes and violent armed groups (including youth gangs), the sociology of energy and natural resources, and market political economy in Sub‐Saharan Africa. He’s the author of Market Criminology: State‐Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry. His research works cover both North America and Sub‐Saharan Africa.

Adam D. Fine is an Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice and Law & Behavioral Science at Arizona State University. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on perceptions of law and law enforcement, and the effects of justice system involvement. A recipient of the American Psychological Foundation's Visionary Grant, his recent work appears in Crime & Delinquency and Law and Human Behavior.

Gabrio Forti is Full Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology in the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, where he is also Director of ASGP – Graduate School on Criminal Justice. His scholarship focuses on criminal negligence, corruption, organized and economic crime, criminology, media and crime, law and literature. Most recently, he directed a European research project resulting in the book Victims and Corporations. Legal Challenges and Empirical Findings. His latest publication is a book on the literary “care” of legal rules (La cura delle norme. Oltre la corruzione delle regole e dei saperi, 2018).

Angela Francis is currently a senior Lecturer at UWE. She initially trained as a solicitor, but later qualified as a barrister. She practised in Criminal and Employment law. Angela specialized in employment law, dealing with unfair dismissal and discrimination cases. Angela has also held a door tenancy whilst teaching, practicing in criminal and employment law. Angela currently teaches at University of West England, and she is an ATC accredited advocacy trainer.

Arie Freiberg is an Emeritus Professor of Law at Monash University, Australia. He was Dean of the Faculty of Law, Monash University, between 2004 and 2012. He has over 150 publications in the fields of sentencing, non‐adversarial justice, and regulation and is currently chair of both the Victorian and the Tasmanian Sentencing Advisory Councils.

David O. Friedrichs (retired) was Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Criminal Justice, and Criminology at the University of Scranton (Pennsylvania). He is the author of Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society (4th edition); other books include (with Dawn L. Rothe) Crimes of Globalization and (with Isabel Schoultz and Aleksandra Jordanoska) Edwin H. Sutherland. He served as President of the White Collar Crime Research Consortium and received its Outstanding Publication Award.

Miranda A. Galvin received her PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests include white‐collar crime, criminal justice processing, and the impact of policy. She served as a 2018 Mirzayan Fellow at the National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she worked with the Committee on Law and Justice. Her work has been published in journals such as Criminology & Public Policy and Justice Quarterly.

Adam K. Ghazi‐Tehrani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at The University of Alabama. His work focuses on white‐collar, corporate, state, and cybercrimes; his recent publications are comparative and cover the Asian sphere.

Carole Gibbs is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State. Her research interests include white‐collar and corporate crime (particularly those with environmental impacts) and race, gender, and crime. She previously received the Young Scholar Award from the White‐Collar Crime Research Consortium and is currently Vice‐Chair of the Division of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime. Recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology and Law & Policy.

Petter Gottschalk is Professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway. He has been the CEO at several companies, including ABB Datacables and Norwegian Computing Center. Dr. Gottschalk has published extensively on internal investigations, knowledge management, and white‐collar crime.

Jasmine Hébert is a PhD student in criminology at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where she studies the relationship between capitalist notions of sacrifice and corporate violence. Her MA thesis critically examined corporate manslaughter legislation in the United Kingdom.

Thomas J. Holt is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University specializing in cybercrime, policing, and policy. He received his PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2005. He has published extensively on cybercrime and cyberterror with over 35 peer‐reviewed articles in outlets such as Crime & Delinquency, Sexual Abuse, The Journal of Criminal Justice, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Deviant Behavior.

Wim Huisman is Professor of Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, and head of the VU School of Criminology. Also, Huisman is president of the Netherlands Society of Criminology and co‐Editor in Chief of Crime, Law and Social Change. Huisman is co‐founder of the European working group on Organizational Crime (EUROC), the white‐collar crime working group of the European Society of Criminology. His research interests are organizational and white‐collar crime, including fraud, corruption, environmental crime, and corporate involvement in atrocity crimes.

Ben Hunter is Associate Professor in Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Greenwich, UK. His research interests include white‐collar and corporate crime and desistance from offending. His recent books include White‐Collar Offenders and Desistance from Crime and (with Stephen Farrall, Gilly Sharpe, and Adam Calverley) Criminal Careers in Transition.

Cheryl Lero Jonson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Xavier University. Her current research interests focus on the impact of prison on recidivism, incentivizing justice, the use of meta‐analysis to organize criminological knowledge, prison conditions, and active shooter responses. She has published over 35 articles as well as the books Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences, The American Prison: Imagining a Different Future, and The Origins of American Criminology.

Aleksandra Jordanoska is Lecturer at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. Her research focuses on misconduct and modes of governance in financial markets, regulation theory, and financial crime. She has published on complex fraud trials, policing bribery in financial markets, and white‐collar crime theory.

Tomomi Kawasaki is Professor in Criminal Law and Criminology in the Faculty of Law of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He holds both an MA and a PhD in law from Doshisha University. His research primarily focuses on corporate crime and corporate criminal responsibility from comparative perspectives.

Jay P. Kennedy is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, jointly appointed to the School of Criminal Justice and the Center for Anti‐Counterfeiting and Product Protection. He received his PhD in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2014. He has published over 20 peer‐reviewed manuscripts in a wide variety of outlets, including (but not limited to) Criminal Justice Review, Journal of Financial Crime, Maritime Economics & Logistics, and Organization Management Journal.

Zachery H. Kodatt received his Master's in criminology and criminal justice from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2016.

Nicholas Lord is Reader in Criminology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on white‐collar and corporate crimes of a financial and economic nature and the organization of serious crimes for gain, such as fraud and corruption in business. Recent books include Negotiated Justice and Corporate Crime (with Colin King) and Corruption in Commercial Enterprise: Law Theory and Practice (with Liz Campbell).

Corina Medley is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Law, Criminology and Government at the University of Plymouth, UK. She is an early‐career academic with research interests in the following areas: critical and cultural criminology, green criminology, capitalist realism and consumerism, sexuality, and animals and animality.

Michele Bisaccia Meitl is an Assistant Professor at Texas Christian University in the Department of Criminal Justice. She received her PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2017 and is also a licensed attorney. Michele focuses her research on criminal law and procedure as well as the United States Supreme Court.

Henry N. Pontell is Distinguished Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Irvine. His writings span white‐collar and corporate crime, punishment and social control, comparative criminology, identity theft, and cybercrime. His most recent book (with Robert Tillman and William Black) is Financial Crime and Crises in the Era of False Profits.

Benjamin van Rooij is Professor of Law and Society at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Global Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. He studies and teaches about the interaction between law and behavior. His current research focuses on individual differences in compliance, toxic corporate culture, and assumptions about behavioral change. His work has appeared in academic journals including Law and Human Behavior and Regulation & Governance. He has also written in popular outlets including The New York Times and The Huffington Post.

Melissa L. Rorie is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada‐Las Vegas (UNLV). Her research predominantly examines the impact of formal and informal controls on corporate and white‐collar offending. She is currently involved in a variety of projects that examine regulation and corporate compliance in the gaming industry, theoretical explanations for elite white‐collar and corporate crime, and quantitative research methodology. Her research has been published in Oxford Handbooks and Edward Elgar readers as well as a variety of peer‐reviewed journals, including: Crime, Law and Social Change, Criminology & Public Policy, Law & Policy, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

Dawn L. Rothe is a Director and Professor at Florida Atlantic University, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She is the author or co‐author of 10 books including, most recently, The Violence of Neoliberalism: Crime, Harm and Inequality (2019), Explorations in Critical Criminology: Essays in Honor of William J. Chambliss (co‐authored with Victoria E. Collins, 2019), Crimes of the Powerful: An Introduction (co‐authored with David Kauzlarich, 2016), Toward a Victimology of State Crime (co‐authored with David Kauzlarich, 2015), and over 100 articles and book chapters. Her overall focus remains on issues of power, inequality, and the harms and violence of the powerful.

Nicholas Ryder is Professor in Financial Crime. Nicholas has published four monographs, edited collections, over 80 papers, and is the series editor for Routledge's The Law Relating to Financial Crime. His research has been sponsored by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the City of London Police Force, ICT Wilmington Risk & Compliance, Universities South West, the France Telecom Group, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Nicholas is an invited contributor to symposia at the Law Commission, the Royal United Services Institute, PricewaterhouseCoopers, NATO, and UK Finance.

Isabel Schoultz is a Associate Senior Lecturer at the Sociology of Law Department, Lund University, Sweden. Schoultz’s main research interest lies within crimes of the powerful. She has – among other things – published on control of state crime and neutralizations of corporate crime, and has co‐authored a book (with David O. Friedrichs and Aleksandra Jordanoska) on Edwin Sutherland (2017).

Rachel E. Severson is a current doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include mental health issues in the criminal justice system and mental illness/substance abuse and crime.

Sally S. Simpson is Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for the Study of Business Ethics, Regulation, & Crime at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is President‐elect and honorary Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Recipient of the 2018 American Society of Criminology Edwin Sutherland Award, Simpson's research focuses on the etiology and prevention/control of corporate crime. Author of several books and edited volumes, her work also appears in a variety of criminology, law, sociology, and business journals.

Arianna Visconti is Assistant Professor of Criminal Law and Law and the Arts at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, and coordinator for its Graduate School on Criminal Justice (ASGP). Her research covers defamation law, theory of punishment, organizational crimes, crimes against cultural heritage, law, and literature. She jointly coordinated a European research project resulting in the book Victims and Corporations. Legal Challenges and Empirical Findings, published in 2018.

Christian Walburg is a Lecturer at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Münster, Germany. He received his PhD with a thesis on immigration and juvenile delinquency. His main research interests include economic crime and its regulation, criminal procedure, juvenile delinquency, and immigration and crime.

April Wall‐Parker is a former Research Associate with the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), where she worked from 2004 to 2018. Her work at NW3C spanned many research areas: the National Public Surveys on White Collar Crime, cybercrime, intellectual property crime, terrorism, and stress and trauma among cybercrime examiners, among others. She holds a Master of Science in criminal justice from Fairmont State University and currently works as a Research Coordinator with a regional non‐profit agency.

David Whyte is Professor of Socio‐legal Studies in the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool, UK. His research and teaching interests are focused on the connections between law and corporate power. He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2017–2019).

Karin van Wingerde is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her research focuses on the interplay between regulation and enforcement and the behavior of and within business firms. Recent research topics include risk‐based regulation in occupational health and safety, the misuse of corporate vehicles for gain, and effective means of punishment for organized crime.

Diego Zysman‐Quirós is an Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he is Adjunct Professor of Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He has a Master's and PhD from Universidad de Barcelona, Spain, and is currently a criminal law attorney. He has served as a Judge and High Law Clerk of Criminal Court in Penal Economic Matters, Buenos Aires. He has authored two books, edited two books, and written numerous chapters and journal articles.

Philosopher Thomas Reid once wrote:

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. To this chiefly it is owing that we find sects and parties in most branches of science, and disputes, which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue.

(Reid et al. 1850, p. 1)

This quote succinctly encapsulates the motivation for organizing the Handbook of White‐Collar Crime in its current form. White‐collar criminology has struggled with conceptualizing its primary outcome of interest since Sutherland coined the term “white‐collar crime” in 1939. Ultimately, I believe that a failure to define any concept results in confusion surrounding how best to observe, record, understand, and improve that concept. This struggle is not unique to white‐collar crime, but the failure to clearly conceptualize the term has – in my humble opinion – stymied research and practice in this domain.

Definitional ambiguity means that the behaviors considered “white‐collar crimes” by one person likely differ from another person's imagery of the term. In other words, if people consider white‐collar crime to be “… a violation of criminal law by a person of the upper socio‐economic class in the course of his occupational activities” (Sutherland 1941, p. 112), their recommendations for researching and preventing such crimes will diverge from proposals by someone who defines such crimes as “… an illegal act or series of illegal acts committed by nonphysical means and by concealment or guile, to obtain money or property, to avoid the payment or loss of money or property, or to obtain business or personal advantage” (Edelhertz 1970, p. 3). Adhering to the first definition would promote closer monitoring and enforcement of behaviors by the elites in society, while following the second definition would motivate the examination of common property crimes like credit card fraud or welfare fraud as well as upperworld business frauds. Some argue that the powerful in society use the latter (offense‐based) type of definition to their advantage; social control agents tout their efforts to combat white‐collar crime, yet such efforts have primarily targeted low‐level individuals and fail to address systemic violations and their widespread harms (Pontell 2016). Others argue that prioritizing an offender's status constitutes “antimiddle‐class bias” and widens the criminological net to include immoral but not necessarily illegal behaviors (Toby 1979, pp. 519–520). Ultimately, in failing to decide what the focus should be, white‐collar criminologists risk being ineffective in their recommendations for research and policy.

This handbook covers the usual topics found in discussions of white‐collar crime – who the offenders are, who the victims are, how we punish these crimes, theoretical explanations, etc. However, most of the authors were encouraged to think about how the “usual” understanding of these topics is impacted by one's conceptualization of white‐collar crime, using Friedrichs's (1992) typology (described in more detail in the following chapters) to delineate such knowledge. As reviewed early in the book, criminologists have spent the past 75 years or so debating about the most appropriate definition, but far less time has been dedicated to thinking about how the choice of one definition over another affects the knowledge that we have. As demonstrated in a recent meta‐analysis on corporate crime deterrence (Rorie et al. 2018), the way one conceptualizes these crimes (not surprisingly) impacts the measurement choices one makes. Measurement decisions, in turn, obviously have implications for one's findings and conclusions. Failing to find common ground on a definition means that disparate findings will continue to impede knowledge building. Breaking down crimes into different categories is a great first step, but even within those categories there are a wide variety of behaviors that constitute the domain of interest.

In addition to examining definitional issues, the current handbook is unique for a few other reasons. First, I specifically sought out non‐Western perspectives on white‐collar crime. In fact, in the section comprising international perspectives, research from all continents outside of Antarctica is discussed. There is also a chapter discussing the need for more comparative research on the topic. Second, I recruited a diverse group of authors with regards to career trajectory. There are world‐renowned experts in the field as well as relatively new voices making contributions to this handbook. Third, the last section of this handbook discusses emerging topics in the field. By including this section, I hoped to orient future research endeavors toward “urgent matters” in the current political and social climate. Finally, the authors were encouraged to avoid jargon and make the book approachable for more junior scholars; that said, the topics addressed throughout make great contributions to the white‐collar crime canon and are relevant to scholars at all stages of their careers.

I sincerely hope that this book's approach further encourages an appreciation for the role of conceptualization in white‐collar crime scholarship. I am incredibly indebted to the scholars who have written extensively on this topic beforehand – some agreeing that definitional ambiguity is a hindrance, others arguing that it is not problematic. These scholars stimulated my interest in definitional issues, in addition to impressing upon me the importance of studying these crimes more generally. Sally S. Simpson, David O. Friedrichs, John Braithwaite, Michael L. Benson, Wim Huisman, Mark A. Cohen, and Judith van Erp are some of the primary names that come to mind, although I’m sure I’m missing quite a few people. I'd also like to acknowledge the chapter authors, all of whom accepted my suggestions with aplomb and worked incredibly hard to achieve the primary objectives of the book. I'd like to recognize some of my “early‐career” peers and University of Maryland colleagues (many of whom are chapter authors) for providing such great support throughout the years – Karin van Wingerde, Jay P. Kennedy, Aleksandra Jordanoska, Natalie Schell‐Busey, Carole Gibbs, and Nicholas Lord. It has been wonderful to work with all of you, both formally and informally. Finally, I am so grateful to the series editor, Charles Wellford, who gave me the chance to work on this volume and provided invaluable guidance throughout the process. I have learned a tremendous amount and have met many incredible scholars, all of whom share a passion for research and practice that is unparalleled.