Charting Europe’s moral economies: Citizens, consumers and the crimes of everyday life

• Main Author: Karstedt, Susanne
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2015
• Subjects: Criminology not elsewhere classified; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10072/171786

My assignment here is to offer some American reflections on an emerging European criminology of white-collar crime, which is so thoroughly represented in this handbook. As a native-born, lifelong American citizen, and as someone who has been thoroughly engaged with the criminology of white-collar crime over a long period of time - and especially over the past 25 years or so - I should be up to this challenge. But I would also note that my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and I grew up in a home with a German-born father, a French-born mother, and an English-born grandmother: i.e. in a home suffused with a European sensibility. I first visited Europe as a young child in 1952 - when some of the bomb damage of World War II was still very visible - and I have visited Europe many times in the intervening years. In recent years I have especially enjoyed participating in stimulating criminological symposia in Prato, Maastricht, London, Onati and Utrecht. Most recently, in May-June 2013, I did a brief visiting professor stint at Stockholm University, addressed the Finnish Economic Crime Investigators during their annual educational cruise, and made a presentation at the University of Iceland. So I am certainly an American, but one with a completely European ancestry and family heritage and multiple ties to a European world. Before proceeding further, however, one could note that both American and European are obviously somewhat problematic terms in relation to any notion of a unified or homogeneous perspective. As Hazel Croall correctly notes, in her Afterword, the term 'American' itself is problematic in terms of whether it refers to North American only, as is the norm, or all the Americas (i.e. Central and South America as well). And of course the term is commonly applied, as is the case here, even more restrictively, to the United States. Altogether, American white-collar crime scholars adopt quite diverse approaches. In my case, I identify primarily with a humanistic (as opposed to positivistic) ...