ABSTRACT
As experienced entrepreneurship scholars working in a business school environment, for us, one of the most interesting trends to emerge in recent years has been the developing awareness of the existence of literature that can be loosely termed ‘criminal entrepreneurship’ (Gottschalk 2009; Hobbs 1988; Smith 2009) but accommodates informal, immoral, amoral and illegal forms of entrepreneurship. Indeed, within business school circles, interest in informal and illegal forms of enterprise is increasing as evidenced by an expanding body of published work (Frith and McElwee 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Gottschalk 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Gottschalk and Smith 2011; Smith 2009; Smith and McElwee 2013a, 2013b). Yet, like the study of entrepreneurship per se, there remains much dubiety and uncertainty as to what exactly constitutes criminal entrepreneurship. Similarly to ‘moral entrepreneurship’ (Anderson and Smith 2007), criminal entrepreneurship builds on a disparate literature in the social sciences. There is therefore a great deal of conceptual confusion because scholars from each discipline use different approaches and concepts to achieve a disciplinary understanding of its importance to their subject area. This chapter begins to address this lacuna by first mapping the literatures and suggesting ways in which scholars from different disciplines could work together to author universally applicable theoretical frameworks with greater explanatory power.
