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“Business is business”: a journey into a French suburban drug-dealing bureaucratic gang

Thomas Sorreda (EDHEC Business School, Lille, France)
Xavier Philippe (Department of HR and Organization, EM Normandie – MétisLab, Caen, France)

Society and Business Review

ISSN: 1746-5680

Article publication date: 3 June 2020

Issue publication date: 20 October 2020

156

Abstract

Purpose

Illegal companies remain an underexplored research avenue. Indeed, although extant literature has already discussed organizational analysis of illicit businesses from a marketing or an entrepreneurial point of view, few papers have focused on it. The purpose of this study is to explore and uncover the bureaucratic aspects of this kind of structure. To do so, this study intends to demonstrate that even the most hidden organizations in a given society are shaped by common representations orienting them toward well-disseminated models.

Design/methodology/approach

An ethno-sociological study was conducted, thanks to a long non-participant immersion (over one year) by observing a drug-dealing organization in a French suburban area located near Paris.

Findings

This study illustrates that illicit organizations reproduce traditional organizational schemes that help them to ensure efficiency and sustainability. Indeed, they fit into modern bureaucratic models within which procedures remain highly normative and formal, but also within which interactions between members are both constrained by a regulative framework and, at the same time, enable a certain amount of autonomy and creativity at work.

Social implications

The business case in this study analyzes the implications of seeing illicit businesses as organizations like any others. The counterintuitive results show that these organizations set and normalize processes allowing the establishment of a formal hierarchy, and specific yet strict rules.

Originality/value

The originality of this paper comes from its unit of analysis and specific subject.

Keywords

Citation

Sorreda, T. and Philippe, X. (2020), "“Business is business”: a journey into a French suburban drug-dealing bureaucratic gang", Society and Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 145-163. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-09-2018-0102

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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