ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the empirical adequacy of a recent conceptual trend in criminological research that is best described as the global mapping of organised crime and criminal organisations. A serious shortcoming of global-transnationalinternational studies of organised crime is that they ignore or substantially underestimate the importance of the local context as an environment within which criminal networks function. Based on the case studies of an ongoing ethnographic investigation (Hobbs and Dunnighan, 1997), this chapter suggests that improved understanding is gained by exploring the dynamics of the local context of trading networks and transformative systems of criminal and legitimate commercial activity that facilitate sources of innovative mediation between a matrix of local places, flexible spaces, local and global networks and negotiated criminal collaborations. The case-study abstracts enter the lifeworlds of organised crime from two perspectives: first, the concept of locality is explored, paying particular attention to the reflective trajectories and mirrored dissolution of urban working-class populations and the traditional organised family firm, and secondly, the criminal careers of various deviant identities are examined. Following on, the paper presents an analysis of the key thematic issues raised in these studies and discusses their implications for contemporary understandings of organised crime. As the final discussion evolves, it will become increasingly apparent that our experience of crime is grounded in the local, a dynamic mapping context that, when perceived in terms of a collectivity of experiences, constitutes a fundamentally different way of seeing and defining organised crime.
