As many of you know, I have been researching employee theft, occupational crime, dishonesty, and workplace deviance for nearly thirty years. Regularly I peruse the scholarly journals and academic publications in the library looking for new research studies that can help us all better understand this phenomenon. This column will feature a couple of studies that may shed some new light on this continuing problem. I have included the full citations so you can find these publications online or in your local library to read and share with your staff. If you can't find the articles, send me an email,…

During this past fall semester, I was on an academic sabbatical. This is a time when professors are temporarily relieved of their everyday teaching and administrative duties in order to travel, write, conduct research, and generally "recharge their intellectual batteries." In October I was invited to Bogotá, Colombia, to present a keynote presentation at the very first loss prevention conference sponsored by FENALCO, which is the Colombian national retail association. Then in November my wife and I traveled to northern Thailand primarily to visit the cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rei. We rode elephants, crossed the Mekong River into…

The final report of the 2010 National Retail Security Survey (NRSS) recently has been released in its nineteenth edition and has been posted on the web. This column is an executive summary of the major findings of this report. This year, despite the fact that we are still mired in sluggish economic times, we can proudly report that 140 retail corporations sent in questionnaires. Not all surveys were fully completed, which caused some missing data problems. However, this response level includes 40 more firms than participated last year. This study would not be in its nineteenth year of reporting retail…

This past August, large-scale rioting took place in London and other United Kingdom cities. Looting of stores, setting fires, and major acts of civil disobedience were all precipitated by the shooting of a black man named Mark Duggan by the London police. On August 6th, during a peaceful march protesting the Duggan shooting, a heavy-handed police response to the march triggered serious arson, thefts, and aggravated shoplifting. Rioting with arson soon spread to various London boroughs and then other English cities. The most severe disturbances outside London occurred in Bristol and cities in the Midlands and the northwest of England.…

The whole retail industry breathed a collective sigh of relief recently when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision in June not to hear a gender wage inequity case as a "class-action suit" against Walmart. The case was focused on whether or not the largest employer in the world could be accused in civil court with collectively discriminating against numerous women in many different states. All these suits alleged that the plaintiffs were not paid equitably when compared to their male counterparts. If the case had gone forward as a class-action lawsuit, this ruling would have set a major precedent…

Nature Versus Nurture As the human genome is ever more accurately mapped by medical and biological researchers, one of the most intriguing questions involves whether there is a gene that influences involvement in criminal behavior. From the very beginnings of the study of deviant behavior, criminologists have hypothesized that crime propensity might be inherited and can be passed from generation to generation. Over the past few hundred years, crime researchers alternatively have accepted and then dismissed this theory of criminal behavior. As a result, the genetic linkage to crime has become one of the most controversial debates in the discipline.…