Exploring Opportunity Structure of Small-Town Municipal Clerks and White-Collar Crime

• In Event: Predicting and Explaining White-Collar and Corporate Offending

Abstract

Studies of white-collar crimes have found female underrepresentation, even in female-dominant occupations. One group of explanations focuses on access to criminal opportunities, including the glass ceiling and limited access to managerial positions or informal networks. Alternatively, social and cultural pathways assert that women avoid committing crimes even with the presence of criminal opportunities. Collecting new stories on rural town clerk embezzlement in the United States, this study employs content analysis and finds that embezzlement in rural small towns is a gendered crime by a gendered position. The study will attempt to explain the opportunity structure of embezzlement by rural town clerks using the opportunities perspective and multiple theories.

Authors

• Hei Lam Chio, Saint Martin's University

• Robert Hauhart, Saint Martin's University