TY - JOUR
AU - Sergi, Anna
AB - Organized crime is one of those sexy concepts that roots its common perceptions in Hollywood images of gangsterism and violence, drugs, and crime, but also rituals and camaraderie. Various and different phenomena are included more or less directly in our contemporary, Westernized conceptualization of organized crime. For academics, in fact, organized crime is an empty signifier, a concept that encompasses too much but eventually is too broad to mean anything specific or even useful. The old adagio ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck’ has also been used in the past, especially in the UK, to avoid definitions of organized crime for legal or institutional purposes. Organized crime means different things to different institutions and countries: from a criminal enterprise driven by profit to a semi-governance structure seeking power; from a local network of drug dealers to transnational traffickers. Depending on the period and on the territory of reference, organized crime has been understood and classified as illegal entrepreneurship and professional crime, or illegal organizations engaging in a range of different criminal and non-criminal activities. The organizational character of organized crime has often been compared and contrasted to its entrepreneurial side. On one side, the ‘organization’ (the structure) of organized crime and on the other, the ‘crimes’ of organized crime (the activities). At the denotative level, organized crime is the illicit economy of (complex) criminal markets, whereas at the connotative level, it indicates criminal groups and networks that are classified as a global threat in criminal policies. Organized crime intended from the perspective of actors, as ‘unlawful associations’, are usually understood as having a collective identity—like Italian mafias. On the other side, when organized crime is looked at from the perspective of criminal activities, the focus rests on trafficking activities. Organized crimes are often activities against national security, whereby national security entails a set of values and beliefs such as good governance, democracy, welfare, collective well-being, and liberty. These criminal activities and the networks committing them profoundly impact upon national and international economy. Organized crime, in this sense, can also threaten democratic values in forms of fraudulent competition and corruption in politics and/or public sector, for example. The complexity of organized crime has led to different results in policy-making and for public perception of the phenomenon. While it is increasingly more difficult to police manifestations, activities, and actors of organized crime, because of their transnationality, sophistication, and diversity, it is even more important to be as specific and as thorough as possible in the way this category of crime is studied and explained. There are always risks when one attempts to explain the complexity, which are the reduction of specificity and the approximation of concepts. This Very Short Introduction edition for organized crime in its accessible format, its shortness, and in the approachability of its language, succeeds in this very difficult task: it explains the various components of organized crime as a multifaceted phenomenon without reducing its complexity and without approximation of its specificity. Antonopolous and Papanicolaou have been able, in approximately 130 pages of a pocket size book, to offer a virtually complete insight into the world and tribulation of organized crime as a subject crossing boundaries of criminology, sociology, political sciences, international relations, and history. This book is a very well-crafted introductory text to what organized crime is, who it is, and what it does. In a poignant and constructive way, the book covers the construction of organized crime as a concept, by looking at those aspects of deviant behaviour that constitutes our normative understanding of organized criminality. In doing so, the book attracts the lay reader as well as the trained practitioner in this field by looking at both well-known characteristic of organized crime—for example, by focusing on famous criminal groups like the Italian mafias or the Japanese Yakuza or Colombian cartels—and also at the main activities usually connected or understood as ‘organized crime’, such as drug trafficking of human trafficking. The book is an easy read, but this does not mean that the authors do not embrace and propose critical and theoretical perspectives in between the lines. The rigour of their academic standing is clear in the choice and organization of the topics around macro-area such as structures and businesses of organized crime. This book in fact engages with the key definitional debates relating to social, political, media, cultural, and ideological dimensions of this field of study. The book is international in focus and represents a very good starting point for students and practitioners in different countries. The book offers a simple and yet effective introduction to the subject and asks preliminary questions to both understand organized crime and start to think how to prevent and counter crimes and deviant behaviours when their degree of organization amplify risks, damage, and harm. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Georgios A. Antonopolous and Georgios Papanicolaou (2018). Organized Crime: A Very Short Introduction
JF - Policing:A Journal of Policy and Practice
DO - 10.1093/police/pay070
DA - 2018-08-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/georgios-a-antonopolous-and-georgios-papanicolaou-2018-organized-crime-Jn4UCY6d5S
SP - 1183
EP - 1184
VL - 14
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -