ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on territories that have been more central to criminological concern in the Fordist period, with a view to (re)thinking their significance in the new post-Fordist market circumstances namely, the spheres of 'economic crime' and 'street crime'. As long ago as 1974, Raymond Williams coined the concept of 'mobile privatization' to describe one of the defining dimensions of the emergent culture of market society. In 1983, he revisited the concept as an ugly phrase for an unprecedented condition. Individual incidents of major fraud reported to the press and receiving public attention in Britain during the 1980s included some instances of 'insider-trading' personal gains, notably by an elected MP and a senior executive of a City of London brokerage. The notion that criminological discussion of 'the problem of fraud' might proceed without the troublesome intrusion of moral or political discussion or argument is dramatically challenged in any examination of fraud and abuse of the welfare system.
