Preface: The organization of serious crimes

AuthorAdam Edwards,Michael Levi
Published date01 November 2008
Date01 November 2008
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1748895808097402
Subject MatterArticles
359
Preface: The organization of serious crimes:
Developments in research and theory
ADAM EDWARDS AND MICHAEL LEVI
It is a decade since a special issue of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice
on Organised Crime (Levi, 1998), which helped to set the conceptual and
empirical agenda for that subject in British journals, including a seminar
series funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Edwards
and Gill, 2003). Since that time there has been significant growth in
research in Europe, both at an empirical and policy level, and a correspond-
ing flourishing of journal articles and books. In official thinking there has
also been a significant shift from a fairly simple law enforcement crime sup-
pression model to ‘harm reduction from organized crime’, symbolized by
the creation of the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in 2006.
Contributions to this special issue of Criminology and Criminal Justice con-
sider some of the key conceptual and methodological advances of this bur-
geoning research agenda, primarily through reference to developments in
the UK within a broader European landscape. The lens could, of course, be
opened far wider and, in addition to the continued development of research
in North America (in many respects the original home of the policy concept
of organized crime), Eurasia, the Antipodes and the developing world have
become important foci for empirical research on the purported ‘globaliza-
tion’ of serious crime. We could have had a greater involvement of non-
British European colleagues, with whom we have worked on projects over
the past decade. Confining ourselves to the EU, in addition to Italy, there is
an abundance of fine scholarship on organized crime-related issues at vari-
ous universities, government and independent institutes in Belgium, the
Netherlands and Scandinavia, with substantial work also in Bulgaria,
Germany and Slovenia. There are advantages, however, in having a more
limited focus, particularly if the uneven local manifestation of serious crime
problems is not to be lost in high-political imagery of the ‘global crime
problem’. And a broader selection of different nations would have brought
its own problems of representation. Making the nation-state the unit of
analysis generates its own problems, but as long as we retain polities of this
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 8(4): 359–361
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808097402

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