Contacts, opportunities, and crime: Relational foundations of criminal enterprise (French and English text)

The basic argument follows that relative success and criminal achievement depend on how offenders go about doing crime. An offender's search for increasing financial returns and decreasing costs is mediated by the structure of his pool of useful and trustworthy contacts. This social embeddedness or purposive network action framework from which this claim extends is at the core of this study of successful careers in organized crime. More specifically, the thesis combines the structural hole theory of competition in legitimate enterprise (Burt 1992) with past findings on networks in crime in developing a series of theoretical insights and propositions on the evolution of organized crime careers.; Structural hole theory tells us that business-oriented persons who have personal networks designed to promote high levels of disconnectivity achieve and maintain competitive advantages in their earning activities and overall careers. The structural hole concept is used to grasp those entrepreneurial opportunities within the network that allow one to broker, between disconnected others in a timesaving and efficient manner. The greater an individual's access to such opportunities, the greater the level of disconnectivity within the personal network, and the greater the potential for success.; Criminal memoirs serve as the primary data sources for two case studies conducted on diametrically-opposed organized crime participants. The study seizes the consistent egocentric-network flow that serves as the backbone for many of these life or career history accounts. In doing so, it became possible to identify various transitions, events, or outcomes throughout each career, and subsequently localize the pertinent co-participants implicated in and around each.; In the organized crime careers studied here, the offenders' advancements within their specific earning activities (international cannabis smuggling and Cosa-Nostra-affiliated construction racketeering) were accounted for by the structural hole content of their personal working networks at various points in time. Opportunities to broker between disconnected others allowed each to yield higher returns in their activities. Such opportunities also allowed the criminal entrepreneurs to decrease their levels of direct exposure to other participants in their criminal activities through network closure. A decrease in exposure permitted them to further insulate themselves from potentially career-damaging targeting forces. Structural hole or brokerage like opportunities therefore tell us how an offender may structure his network to promote increasing returns from crime while decreasing the costs. In short, this relational approach illustrates how survival and long-term endurance in organized crime is achieved.; In so doing, the argument proposes a framework for a bridging theory of organized crime that incorporates both independent and organizational criminal entrepreneurs. The present thesis provides an alternative to the more standard explanations centering on an individual's capacity for violence, authoritative rule, or market structuring. Personal organization, as indicated by the structure of a participant's personal network and the quality of opportunities that extend from it, is an inherent and common component to successful criminal entrepreneurs and it is within the overlapping of these personal social networks that organized crime processes are founded.