Neal Shover

Neal Shover (born 1940, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.) is an American academic specializing in corporate and white-collar crime. Shover’s first publication, a book chapter titled “Defining Organizational Crime” (1978), served to establish the parameters of the field of corporate and governmental deviance.

Shover was raised in Columbus, Ohio, where he attended public school in an inner city, racially diverse neighbourhood. He received a B.S. degree in social welfare from the Ohio State University in 1963. From 1964 to 1966 he worked as a prison sociologist at Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet. He completed an M.A. degree in sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1969 and subsequently completed a Ph.D. there in 1971. From 1971 to 2010 Shover taught as a professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Much of Shover’s early writings concerned regulatory laws and surface coal mining, including the role of inspectors. As many workplace deaths and injuries are the result of negligence, Shover was an early advocate of criminalizing such behaviour. He also contributed to developing the theoretical explanations of corporate crime, and his book Crimes of Privilege: Readings in White-Collar Crime (2001) furthered work in that area. In addition to his research on white-collar and corporate crime, Shover published work on corrections and wrote one of the early texts on the subject, A Sociology of American Corrections (1979). He has also published articles on telemarketing crimes and tax avoidance and evasion.