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La Salada is South America’s largest marketplace for fraudulently labeled clothing, a sprawling and dangerous bazaar on the fringes of Buenos Aires where counterfeit goods are bought and sold, armed thieves roam the nearby streets, and corrupt police and politicians turn a blind eye to widespread unlawful behaviors. Despite conditions traditionally considered inhospitable to economic growth—including acute interpersonal distrust, pervasive personal insecurity, and rampant violence—business in La Salada is booming under an established order completely detached from the state. Matías Dewey dives deep into the world of La Salada to examine how market exchanges function outside the law an...
This book makes a contribution to understanding the structure of markets on which such illegal transactions occur. The authors apply the tools of economic sociology to develop conceptual frames allowing to understand the organization of such markets and present case studies that provide insights into the illegal side of the economy.
The most extensive account yet of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have created, deeply sourced and based on field research in the world’s technology-crime hotspots. Cybercrime seems invisible. Attacks arrive out of nowhere, their origins hidden by layers of sophisticated technology. Only the victims are clear. But every crime has its perpetrator—specific individuals or groups sitting somewhere behind keyboards and screens. Jonathan Lusthaus lifts the veil on the world of these cybercriminals in the most extensive account yet of the lives they lead, and the vast international industry they have created. We are long past the age of the lone adolescent h...
A volume on the economics of favours and how they function as socially efficacious actions in post-socialist regions including central, eastern, and south eastern Europe; the former Soviet Union; Mongolia; and post-Maoist China.
There is evidence that economic fraud has, in recent years, become routine activity in the economies of both high- and low-income countries. Many business sectors in today's global economy are rife with economic crime. Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud shows how neoliberal policies, reforms, ideas, social relations and practices have engendered a type of sociocultural change across the globe which is facilitating widespread fraud. This book investigates the moral worlds of fraud in different social and geographical settings, and shows how contemporary fraud is not the outcome of just a few ‘bad apples’. Authors from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology and political science, social policy and economics, employ case studies from the Global North and Global South to explore how particular values, morals and standards of behaviour rendered dominant by neoliberalism are encouraging the proliferation of fraud. This book will be indispensable for those who are interested in political economy, development studies, economics, anthropology, sociology and criminology.
This collection brings together some of the most influential sociologists of law to confront the challenges of current transnational constitutionalism. It shows the constitution appearing in a new light: no longer as an essential factor of unity and stabilisation but as a potential defence of pluralism and innovation. The first part of the book is devoted to the analysis of the concept of constitution, highlighting the elements that can contribute from a socio-legal perspective, to clarifying the principle meanings attributed to the constitution. The study goes on to analyse some concrete aspects of the functioning of constitutions in contemporary society. In applying Luhmann’s General Systems Theory to a comparative analysis of the concept of constitution, the work contributes to a better understanding of this traditional concept in both its institutionalised and functional aspects. Defining the constitution’s contents and functions both at the conceptual level and by taking empirical issues of particular comparative interest into account, this study will be of importance to scholars and students of sociology of law, sociology of politics and comparative public law.
Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics explores liminal and illegal practices in relation to political control and cultural normativity. The contributors draw on years of ethnographic experiences in Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Italy, Madagascar, Mali, Philippines, and Thailand to study the contradictions of what is legal and illegal. They explore the production of illegal subjects by the state, the creation of illegal and normative values by liminal and illegal actors, and the mutual entanglements of legal and illegal in the public domains of markets and trade networks. This volume shows that criminalization policies are not necessarily oriented toward erasing crime. Ins...
Over the last few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have turned from analyzing the state's neglect and abandonment into documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Yet, we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. In The Ambivalent State, Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering offer an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police agents and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on a unique combination of ethnographic fieldwork and documentary evidence, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, they analyze the inner-workings of police-criminal collusion, its connections to...
This book presents recent sociological research investigating the intersection of technology, human sexuality, and health. Rapid advances within biomedical, biomechanical, and biodigital domains have prompted scholarly exploration into the ways these technologies are being integrated into, or are reshaping, human sexual and intimate practices and the resulting health implications. Scholarship has also focused on the potential for new technologies to extend the imagined, and real, possibilities for enhancing human sexual experiences. The chapters in this book delve into the interconnected themes of sex, health, bodies, and risk in relation to emerging technologies. They illuminate the intrica...
Leading scholars and policy analysts from around the Americas come together to untangle the factors that have fuelled the implementation of mano dura politics, their rising popularity, and impacts across nine widely heterogeneous countries in Latin America. Beginning with a discussion on the concept of mano dura, the editors move to survey various theoretical approaches to punitivism, and later review of the empirical research evaluating different drivers behind the adoption of tough on crime policies. Since hard-line initiatives often have consequences beyond the general goal of reducing violence, they then analyze the impacts of these policing strategies on crime rates and different democr...