White-Collar Defendants and the Legal Process: Performance, Knowledge and Transformation

This book provides a detailed socio-legal examination of the experiences, perceptions, and responses of individual white-collar defendants following the criminal trial process.

White-collar crime is defined both in an offense-based perspective and an offender-based perspective. The offense-based perspective focuses on non-violent acts for financial gain, while the offender-based perspective focuses on members of the elite in society who abuse their professional positions for financial gain. Applying both of these definitions, this book pursues a close comparative analysis of a number of key international white-collar crime case studies. Examining the formal ritual of the criminal legal process, the book considers the experience of defendants within the performative context of the other legal actors in the trial: advocates, judges, and public participants. In doing so, the book offers a nuanced and compelling socio-legal analysis of the process of white-collar trial and punishment, whilst critically exploring the perceptions and experiences of elite defendants within this under-researched area of the public sphere.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of socio-legal studies, corporate law, and criminal justice.

Petter Gottschalk is Professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway. After completing his education at Technische Universität Berlin, Dartmouth College, MIT, and Henley Management College, he took on executive positions in technology enterprises for 20 years before joining academia. Dr. Gottschalk has published extensively on knowledge management, intelligence strategy, police investigations, white-collar crime, and fraud examinations.

Christopher Hamerton is Programme Director in Criminology and Law at City St George’s, University of London, United Kingdom. Educated at the universities of Oxford and Southampton, he holds degrees in law, criminal justice, and history. In addition, he is a Barrister of the Middle Temple and an elected Fellow of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Linnean Society of London. Dr. Hamerton is an interdisciplinary and comparative scholar whose research and writing primarily focuses on socio-legal and criminological perspectives on organizational deviance and crime.