Looking Back at Other People’s Money: A Qualitative Test of Cressey’s Classic Hypothesis of Trust Violating Behavior

Authors

Paul M. Klenowski, Clarion University of Pennsylvania
Heith Copes, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Abstract

"Cressey’s study of trust violators has had a tremendous impact on how criminologists understand white collar offenders. Despite this, few have sought to replicate or validate his findings. The aim of this study is to replicate Cressey’s classic work to determine if it still has practical theoretical value today. To do this, we relied on data collected from 25 male federally incarcerated occupational offenders using semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that there is moderate empirical support for Cressey’s hypothesis when collectively examining all three components of his hypothesis. We found only minimal support for the importance of “non-shareable problems” because about half of the participants did not mention such issues. We did find strong evidence supporting the importance of verbalizations (i.e., neutralizations) in allowing for these crimes to occur. Overall, these findings suggest that more research needs to be conducted in order to determine why non-shareable problems do not seem to be as important now as they once were for the commission of occupational crimes such as embezzlement."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Klenowski, Paul M. and Copes, Heith (2013) "Looking Back at Other People’s Money: A Qualitative Test of Cressey’s Classic Hypothesis of Trust Violating Behavior," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol1/iss1/2