Shover, Neal (1940–)

A LEADING FIGURE in research and publication concerning white-collar and corporate crime, Neal Shover was raised in Columbus, Ohio, and went to public schools in an inner city, working class, racially diverse neighborhood. He received his B.S. degree in social welfare from Ohio State University in 1963. From 1964 to 1966, he was a prison sociologist at Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet. He completed his M.A. degree in sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1969, subsequently completing his Ph.D. there in 1971. In the early 2000s, Shover was a professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he started his career in 1971.

Shover began publishing in 1978 with the book chapter, “Defining Organizational Crime” in a text on corporate and governmental deviance. This was a significant work in terms of establishing the parameters of the field. A major amount of his early writings concerned regulatory laws and surface-coal mining, including the role of inspectors.

While there has been much written on police roles and behavior, little was known about inspectors in the regulatory arena. This was particularly significant since workplace deaths and injuries take a larger toll than criminal deaths and injuries and many are the consequence of negligence. Thus, he was one of the early advocates of criminalizing such behavior. He has also contributed to developing the theoretical explanations of corporate crime through his published work.

Shover's book, Crimes of Privilege: Readings in White-Collar Crime, helped to further the work in this area. In 2004, Shover published Doing Deals and Making Mistakes: The Challenge of White Collar Crime. He has also published in the area of telemarketing crimes, and tax avoidance and evasion. Besides the white-collar and corporate crime area, Shover is also widely published in the areas of career thieves and corrections (prisons). He published[Page 745] one of the early texts in corrections, A Sociology of American Corrections, in 1979 and later published a book on career thieves, Pursuit and Careers of Persistent Thieves, in 1996. He has been a visiting fellow or scholar at numerous institutions ranging from the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Institute of Justice to the Australian National University in Canberra.