Edwin H. Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern criminology. He revolutionized the field by shifting attention away from biological and psychological explanations of crime toward social and environmental factors. His differential association theory laid the foundation for sociological approaches to deviant behavior by emphasizing that criminal behavior is learned through interactions with others. With his seminal work White Collar Crime (1949), Sutherland challenged the prevailing assumption that crime was largely a phenomenon of the lower classes, introducing a powerful critique of corporate and elite deviance. His efforts to define criminology as a scientific discipline helped institutionalize the field in American universities and continue to influence criminological theory and research today.
