Every organization, large or small, uses a variety of capital to make the business work. No matter the industry, all companies have one thing in common: they must have people to make their capital work for them. This is where HRM professionals come in. Human resource management (HRM) is the process of employing people, training them, compensating them, developing policies relating to them, and developing strategies to retain them. There are several main responsibilities of HRM managers: (1) staffing – one of the major tasks in HRM is staffing. This involves the entire hiring process from posting a job to negotiating a salary package; (2) development of workplace policies – one of the jobs of HRM professionals is to develop the verbiage surrounding policies of fairness and continuity within the organization; (3) compensation and benefits administration – HRM professionals need to determine that compensation is fair, meets industry standards, and is high enough to entice people to work for the organization.
Due to the ambiguous definitions and wide scope of crimes of the powerful, the contributions that will be discussed will focus on white collar crime, as that seems to be where more of the research focuses. The term “white collar crime” was coined by Sutherland in 1939, which he defined as a “phenomenon of lawbreaking by respectable persons of the upper reaches of society” (Reurink, 2016, p. 387). These are crimes of convenience rather than passion, with the powerful using their position to save time and effort to reach their greedy ends (Gottschalk, 2016). Theoretical contributions to white collar crime conceptualization have been drawn from sociology and psychology, starting with Freud and his discussions of conflict of desires and needs that cause people to commit crime (Friedrichs, 2010). According to this framework, white collar criminals desire conventional success, and they need to achieve this success by any means necessary. With this, Sutherland discusses personality traits of white collar criminals, claiming that they have normal personality types with more tendency toward risk- taking, ambition, and egocentrism, which would explain their “subtle” criminality that doesn’t follow typical norm infractions (Friedrichs, 2010). White collar crimes are often not included in official statistics, and most victims are unaware of their victimhood, as these “subtle” crimes occur in private and are typically covered up (Maguire et al., 1994). Next, Gottfredson and Hirschi offer sociogenic explanations, that criminals have lower self-control and therefore make conscious choices to commit crimes (Friedrichs, 2010). White collar crimes are not crimes of passion; they are calculated, conscious decisions people make as a means to an end.
Sutherland, Clinard, and Yeager finally make the important distinction between crimes of corporations and crimes of individuals within the corporations (Olejarz, 2016). It is important to distinguish between these points when considering theory, causes, and consequences. In fact, there has been a recent push in theory to focus on offense criteria instead of individual offenders of white collar crime (Maguire et al., 1994). Sykes an
