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Hirschi studies data and rejects the two prevailing theories -- the criminal is either one who is a frustrated striver forced into deliquency by his acceptance of goals common to us all or one who is an innocent foreigner attempting to obey the rules of a society that is not in a position to make the law or define "evil" conduct. Rather he states the case that delinquents are often free of serious intimate attachments, aspirations, and moral beliefs that bind most people under the theory of social control

Advocates of the concept of white‐collar crime have failed to make the case for its scientific value. Steffensmeier's efforts to save the concept further support our view that it is flawed and misleading. His efforts support our contention that the correlates of white‐collar crime are the same as the correlates of crime, that the age distribution of offending is the same for white‐collar crimes as for other crimes, that official statistics have sufficient validity for many etiological purposes, and that the search for a general theory of crime holds great promise for criminology.

The career model reappears with some consistency in the history of criminology. It consistently fails, however, to organize the facts about crime in a meaningful way. As a consequence, we predict that criminology will once again abandon career models in favor of theories of crime.

This paper begins with a conceptual analysis of the idea of white‐collar crime. It considers data relevant to popular images of white‐collar crime and outlines a general theory of crime explicitly applicable to both ordinary and white‐collar crime. This theory is compared with traditional explanations of white‐collar crime, and several explicit empirical tests of rival views are described.

This paper argues that the increasing dominance in contemporary criminology of the longitudinal or cohort study is not justified on methodological grounds, that this research design has taken criminological theory in unproductive directions, has produced illusory substantive findings, and has promoted policy conclusions of doubtful utility. In addition, it is noted that longitudinal research is very expensive and therefore has high opportunity costs, costs that have not been properly evaluated. The positive thesis is that many of the apparent benefits of longitudinal research can be obtained by carefully designed and reasonably conceptualized cross‐sectional studies, at substantially reduced cost.