Edwin Sutherland

From Freepedia

Edwin H. Sutherland (1893–1950) was the first person to coin the phrase white-collar criminal. He first used the phrase in a speech to the American Sociological Association on December 27, 1939. In his 1949 monograph White-Collar Crime he defined a white-collar crime as "approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation."

He was a sociologist of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and defined differential association which is a theory that explains how deviants come to learn the motivations and the technical knowledge for deviant or criminal activity.