Geoff Dean et al., “Organized Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism” (Oxford UP, 2010)

This week we have Geoff Dean on the show to talk about his new book Organised Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

This is a practical book about organized crime. Geoff and his co-authors, Ivar Fahsing and Petter Gottschalk, approach organized crime from a business perspective and try to provide a means of investigating this type of crime from a market point of view. They see an organized crime enterprise like any other business enterprise, and say that it must go through the same stages or growth that are experienced by a legal commercial business. The authors are experienced researchers in the methodologies of policing and want to recognize the entrepreneurial basis of criminal enterprises, and investigative methods that pay heed to these characteristics of large criminal organizations.

This is not a book about any one criminal group. Many examples and case studies are provided but they intend the book to have universal appeal. One of the books advantages is Geoff’s ability to communicate visually. He is the master of the chart and diagram. As you will hear in the interview, the book is filled with visual explanations of the ideas and concepts it addresses. While Organised Crime was not written as a textbook, I have used it in class and found that it provides a good explanation of organized crime (for advanced students) as well as a great mechanism of strategic analysis which we use as an assessment tool.