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Investigate how leaders of illegal organizations build and maintain positive reputations and how the deaths of these firms impact groups of external stakeholders.

We conduct a forensic analysis of nine firms in eight different countries by leaders who appeared to be highly successful corporate citizens but who turned out to be operating illegal Ponzi ventures.

These illegal firms built positive reputations by engaging in activities that enhanced perceptions of their firms’ perceived quality, gaining certifications and approvals from influential external individuals/organizations, engaging in philanthropic activities, and affiliating with high-status actors. Death of these nine firms had profoundly impacted external stakeholders resulting in investor devastation, a toxic environment of mistrust, damage to reputations of anyone affiliated with these illegal firms, and a major earthshake to the philanthropic community.

Extends Rindova et al.’s (2005) research on how leaders use signals of quality and prominence to build reputations in the context of illegal organizations. Philanthropic activities are added as a reputation-building mechanism used by illegal organizations. The results draw attention to the need to examine how the death of illegal organizations affects a variety of external stakeholders, both individuals and organizations.

Leaders of illegal firms can be quite successful in building positive reputations and this success exacerbates the negative consequences that occur when the firms collapse.

Provides a qualitative study of reputation building and the extensive impact on stakeholders of the dissolution of illegal ventures.

The chapter examines various manifestations of the concept of “social capital” in details by sorting them into three categories: individual, collective, and hybrid. Based on the examination of social capital literature, the chapter defines social capital as moral resources that lubricate cooperation among individuals for economic as well as civic reasons. Then the chapter examines social capital in contemporary urban China. The atomizing effect of market economy destroyed previous stock of social capital, but there are not corrective mechanisms to generate new social capital. Therefore urban China is experiencing the paucity of social capital.

Border security is a crucial part of the country’s broader homeland security efforts. It is a multifaceted and complex issue which attempts to accomplish two seemingly contradictory objectives – the prevention of people and goods from entering the country, while at the same time, facilitating lawful travel and trade. Although it is primarily a federal responsibility, securing the border crosses over multiple homeland security domains, as well jurisdictions. In recent years, numerous strategies and structures have been implemented to foster a whole-of-government approach to border security. This chapter presents border security in the larger context of homeland security. It examines the strategies and coordinating structures developed to create a secured border and an overview of the interaction of law enforcement agencies at the various jurisdictional levels. Although these structures create a robust network of mutually supportive agencies to effectuate border security, a major strategic challenge to securing the nation’s borders still persists.

Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.

This chapter is about online hate speech propagated via platforms operated by social media companies (SMCs). It examines the options open to states in forcing SMCs to take responsibility for the hateful content that appears on their sites. It examines the technological and legal context for imposing legal obligations on SMCs, and analyses initiatives in Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union and elsewhere. It argues that while SMCs can play a role in controlling online hate speech, there are limitations to what they can achieve.

In almost 100 years of Colombian cinema, very few productions have had action-oriented narratives at the core of the film, as this cinema has chiefly developed around mainstream genres of melodrama and popular comedy. Rather than a cinematic end, ‘action’ has worked more as a specific means, mainly through thrillers, for directors to represent, question, and denounce the Colombian armed conflict – a central national issue for over 70 years. Whilst such films have tended to showcase male heroes, some recent productions subvert this tradition, and echo aspects of contemporary action cinema in Hollywood, where female representations problematise the perpetuated male image of the action hero.

This chapter examines contemporary Colombian films that offer hybrid images of female warriors who are (anti)heroic or disruptive, within the conventions of the action genre and within the dominant patriarchal discourse of Colombian narrative cinema, concentrating on Rosario Tijeras (Maillé, 2005) and La Sargento Matacho (González, 2017). Following research on Colombian cinema, context and conflict, this chapter highlights how female characters subsist in the public sphere, taking an active part in illegal armed organisations. It also questions how these representations may promote typologies of female emancipations (victimisers, anti-heroines, hybrid tomboys and war fighters), articulating key notions of emancipation. Ultimately, this chapter reiterates how postmodern representations of the female body subvert classic features of the Hollywood action cinema, by offering inaugural images of tough women within the Colombian/Hispanic popular culture and contexts, by examining particular sequences through Creed's multiple views on the female multi-faceted representations in cinema and Tasker's ample theory on action women and bodies.

Institutional theory and organizational ecology have long proposed alternative (albeit not always contradictory) processes to interpret founding and creation of a novel organizational form. Much of the debate has dealt with the issue of how legitimation processes shape such important events or acts. Empirical research on both sides is rich with interesting results, while much of the controversy regards how legitimation is empirically captured and the ways it unfolds over time.

Recently, within organization ecology this specific issue has received increasing attention in the search for a theory of forms and identities. A central piece of the proposed theory links identities to specific audiences or constituencies, both internal and external, which act by attributing legitimation to novel constructions. The new formulation has originated different efforts aimed at better understanding how audiences develop and how they are shaped by wider social movements. Existing research has mainly been dealing with organizations (and forms), which appear to be legitimate (albeit not legitimated) from their inception, benefiting from the generalized acceptance of business organizations in modern societies. Limited attention has been devoted to analyzing contrasted forms, i.e. organized forms of action which act at the border or outside the border of established economic and social action. I contend that it is by analyzing these extreme cases that a clearer interpretation of legitimacy and legitimation processes can be achieved. By analyzing the evolution and the principal dynamics of three populations that are operating in gray and black market, I propose a critique to existing theories of legitimacy.

In this chapter, we first argue for a green criminological perspective on culture as well as nature, as those concepts are framed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Second, from within this green criminological perspective we discern a neocolonial hegemony in the resource extraction from developing countries that is represented by international trafficking markets in looted cultural heritage and poached wildlife. In other words, developed nations benefit from these trades while developing nations suffer, and governance regimes attempting to control these global criminal trades prioritise the rational interests and cultural norms of the more powerful market nations over the local interests and cultural histories of communities at the source of the chain of supply. Finally, our third argument is that the emerging intellectual framework of sustainable development, as represented in the UN's goals, may provide a perspective on the issue of trafficking culture and nature that can push back against the neocolonial hegemony of international criminal markets such as these.

Inequality of rights, wage gaps, and gender stereotypes are the context in which women in Latin America live, aggravating their situation of poverty. Under this scenario, drug trafficking is presented as a legitimate job offer as an answer to women’s economic needs. Currently, drug trafficking not only categorizes women as merchandise for sexual services but also integrates professional, technical, and logistical services within the criminal structures.

This research follows a qualitative methodology, making a documentary review to identify the role of women in drug trafficking. As partial results, it is evident that women recognize that gender gaps are not solved by their insertion in the drug trafficking economy, because they must perform jobs that put them at greater risk with the authorities, but they do solve an economic need.