Introduction

The fundamental question that this book seeks to answer is ‘what is “European” about white-collar and corporate crime in Europe?’ The chapters do an excellent job of explaining how looking at Europe as a whole contributes to an understanding of how crime (and responses to crime) compares between countries within the continent, as well as making comparisons between Europe and other regions of the world. In this chapter, I would like to consider a slightly different version of the original question. I will discuss what I think is European about white-collar and corporate crime scholarship in Europe.

I have been incredibly fortunate to have worked with and around European white-collar crime scholars since graduate school. Judith van Erp and Wim Huisman were some of my earlier European influences, who introduced me to other student scholars at the time (like Aleksandra Jordanoska and Karin van Wingerde) as well as many others (as a few examples, Michael Levi, Nicholas Lord and Benjamin van Rooij). All of these individuals have had an incredible impact on my own research and my understanding of white-collar crime. Early on, I recognized some of my ‘American privilege’ as a white-collar crime scholar: notably, Wim Huisman introduced himself to me at an American Society of Criminology conference and remarked that my dissertation topic was similar to something he had written a few years earlier. I believe he said something along the lines of “I made a great mistake in only publishing it in Dutch!” That conversation really opened my eyes to the notion that I might be missing out on important research – mainly because I wasn't looking hard enough for it. I hope with this chapter that I can impart to the reader how a failure to recognize European scholarship in the white-collar crime domain (and in criminology more broadly) limits our ability to build knowledge.

To that end, I have gathered information on four different questions comparing European and North American white-collar and corporate crime research. These include the following:

• • where is white-collar and corporate crime research generated?

• • what topics or crime types do European authors cover more often or more thoroughly than North American authors?

• • what methods or strategies are used by European researchers compared to North American researchers?

• • what theories are used by European scholars compared to those used by American scholars?