barriers and back regions as opportunity structures for white-collar crime

Abstract

Opportunities for crime are a central component in many explanatory models for criminality. In research on white-collar crime, this emerges particularly through emphasis on the importance of social position for the possibility of carrying out crime. This article argues that Goffman's ideas about barriers and back regions should be used to specify how social positions strengthen the opportunities for committing economic crime. The basic insight is that opportunities arise in situations where people by virtue of their positions build up barriers that prevent others from foreseeing and becoming aware of what goes on. An empirical case analysis clarifies the concepts’ theoretical content, empirical relevance, and applicability to the research area. Further developments of this approach are discussed in conclusion.

This article was written as part of the project “Financial intermediaries and economic crime,” funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 421-2002-2764). The author thanks Tage Alalehto, Agneta Bogestad, Bengt Larsson, Sven-Åke Lindgren, Elsebeth Ström, and Lotta Pettersson for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹The article treats opportunity structures as independent of other factors such as motives and the question of why an opportunity is exploited. Obviously an opportunity must be identified and be relevant for a person's ambitions in order for him or her to exploit it. This also requires it to be regarded as more suitable in the context than other potential opportunities. See Cressey (1953:77–91), Coleman (1987:410), and Tittle's (1995:205–208) discussions of perception.

²This includes others’ possibilities of control. The absence of people who can exercise control and thus constitute “capable guardians” has often been considered, as is well known, to be an essential element in the possibility of committing crime, as has the lack of effective control procedures (Shover and Bryant 1995:144).

³In cases involving two or more persons who act together as a team in a back region, one can say in Simmel's terminology that they constitute a “secret society” (Simmel 1950:345–376; see also Baker and Faulkner 1993: 843).

⁴A back region is always in relation to a front region, where people are given a certain impression of the individual and his or her actions. The performance itself is the point of reference for the distinction between front and back regions (Goffman 1959:114). The performance is understood as “all that activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” (Goffman 1959:22).

⁵One can also, of course, supplement the typology with the various sorts of barriers that exist when laws and ordinances are established and changed, which was the chief concern of Bachrach and Baratz.

⁶The broker's modus operandi was essentially the same as in the case of Nick Leeson and Barings Bank.

⁷A question-mark account is used by brokerage firms for temporary placement of deals. These may be deals that belong to clients who have not yet obtained a personal account, or deals made for clients where it is unclear exactly which account the client wants to book the deal in, or minor deals that are steps in a major deal that is to be booked on the client only when the entire deal is completed. The idea was that the deals would be on this account only briefly, usually for at most a day.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oskar Engdahl

OSKAR ENGDAHL is in the faculty of the Department of Sociology at Göteborg University. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the development of financial offshore markets and economic crime (2003). Currently, he is working on the role of financial intermediation in economic crime.