Occupational crime is
crime
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Ca ...
that is committed through opportunity created in the course of legal occupation.
Theft
Theft is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word ''theft'' is also used as a synonym or informal shorthand term for som ...
s of company property,
vandalism
Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property.
The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term ...
, the misuse of information and many other activities come under the rubric of occupational crime.
The concept of occupational crime - as one of the principal forms of
white-collar crime
The term "white-collar crime" refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non-directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals. It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a ...
- has been quite familiar and widely invoked since the publication of Clinard and Quinney's influential Criminal Behavior Systems: A Typology.
More recently, however, the term occupational crime has been applied to activities quite removed from the original meaning of white collar crime, and it has been used interchangeably with such terms as occupational deviance and workplace crime. In the interest of greater conceptual clarity within the field of white collar crime the argument is made here for restricting the term 'occupational crime' to illegal and unethical activities committed for individual financial gain - or to avoid
financial loss - in the context of a legitimate occupation. The term 'occupational deviance' is better reserved for
deviation from occupational norms (e.g. drinking on the job; sexual harassment), and the term 'workplace crime' is better reserved for conventional forms of crime committed in the workplace (e.g. rape; assault). The conceptual conflation of fundamentally dissimilar activities hinders theoretical, empirical, and policy-related progress in the field of white collar crime studies.
References
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Crimes