Book Review: Economic Realities and the Female Offender, Jane Roberts Chapman, Lexington Books (1980) 234 pp, $A34.50.; Women, Crime, and Society, Eileen B Leonard, Longman (1982) 208 pp, $A19.50.; Women and Crime: Papers Presented to the Cropwood Round-Table Conference December 1980, Allison Morris (ed), Cropwood Conference Series No 13 Cambridge (1981) 141 pp, £3.50.
| Published date | 01 September 1984 |
| Date | 01 September 1984 |
| Author | Satyanshu K Mukherjee |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486588401700311 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
BOOK
REVIEWS 187
David
Ermann
and
Richard
Lundman
are
among
the
most
talented
of
the
new
crop
of criminologists following in
the
footsteps of Edwin Sutherland to advance
the
study
of white-collar crime. In Corporate and Governmental Deviance,
Ermann
and
Lundman
turn
their
talents to compiling aprovocative collection of readings on
organizations as deviant actors.
The
readings are a well-balanced mixture of classics
such as Sutherland on white-collar crime
and
Geis on
the
heavy electrical
equipment
anti-trust cases.
and
newer
studies such as Lawrence Sherman's work on
deviant
police organizations, Prakash Sethi on
the
Santa Barbaraoil spill, Dowie
and
Marshall
on
the
Bendectin
drug
cover-up
and
Christopher
Stone on
the
Kepone environmental
disaster.
The
only vaguely antipodean
chapter
is on
the
thalidomide disaster;
the
senior
author
is
the
Australian journalist domiciled in Britain, Phillip Knightley.
Corporate and Governmental Deviance is an
updated
version of a 1978 book of
readings. Nearly
half
the
chapters are
new
though
not
original.
It
is a useful collection
for teaching white-collar crime courses, though it suffers from almost exclusive
concentration on American material.
The
editors' introductions to each of
the
four
sections of
the
book are particularly well
written
for students.
The
book begins with acogent overview by
the
editors of
the
organizational
deviance perspective.
Subsequent
readings highlight different
elements
of this
perspective.
Ermann
and
Lundman's book differs from others on white-collar
and
corporate crime in
that
it devotes
quite
adeal of attention to
the
deviance defining
process as well as to
the
factors which predispose organizations to
break
the
law.
This is a valuable book
both
for serious
students
of organizational behaviour
and
white-collar
crime
and
for readers looking for an introduction to
the
study of corporate
crime
enlivened
with absorbing concrete cases.
JOHN
BRAITHWAITE
Canberra
Economic Realities and the Female Offender, Jane Roberts Chapman, Lexington
Books (1980) 234 pp, $A34.50.
Women, Crime, and Society, Eileen B Leonard, Longman (1982) 208 pp, $A19.50.
Women and Crime: Papers Presented to the Cropwood Round-Table Conference
December 1980, Allison Morris (ed), Cropwood Conference Series No 13
Cambridge (1981) 141 pp, £3.50.
Until very recently scholars and researchers working in the area of women and
crime found themselves seriously constrained by the lack of literature in this
substantive subject matter. Lombroso's The Female Offender (1895) was followed
by Pollak's The Criminality
of
Women (1950) and it took another 25 years before
Alder's Sisters in Crime and Simon's Women and Crime appeared. Although these
two later works were pathbreaking in that they stimulated other scholars to examine
the subject, Alder and Simon offered poor evidence, used inadequate techniques,
and drew misleading conclusions. Since then, however, a number of books and
numerous articles in periodicals on the subject have appeared in the United States,
Europe and Australia and a large number of these works have taken issue with
Alder and Simon. Even with this proliferation of literature, the relationship
between women and crime is far from settled, for the issues involved are not only
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