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The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the topic and discuss the individual chapters in this volume as well as to provide an intellectual orientation which will hopefully inspire casual readers to read further. The main thesis behind this volume is that entrepreneurial crime and illegal enterprise span two very distinct yet complimentary academic disciplines – namely Criminology and Entrepreneurial/Business Studies. And that we need to take cognisance of both instead of writing and publishing in disciplinary silos.

Our methodological approach in this volume is predominantly qualitative and in addition mainly review based. Our editorial approach is/was one of laissez-faire in that we did not want to stifle authorial creativity or impose order where there was none, or very little. The result is a very eclectic collection of interesting readings which we hope will challenge researchers interested in the topics to cross inter- and intra-disciplinary literature in search of new theoretical models.

Rather than findings we see the contribution of the volume as being an attempt to start conversations between disciplines. We appreciate that this is only a beginning. There are discoveries and perhaps a need to redraw boundaries. One surprising finding was how much the authors all drew on the seminal work of William Baumol to the extent that it has become a common framework for understanding the cross overs.

There are many limitations to the chapters in this volume. The main one is that in any edited volume the editors are faced with a dilemma of allowing more voices to emerge or imposing a restrictive explanatory framework which in turn shoe horns the chapters into an over-arching sense-making architecture. The limitation of this volume is that it can only present a few of the voices and only begin a synthesis. Interested researchers must work hard to draw meaning from the eclectic voices.

The practical implications from this chapter and the edited chapters are manifold. The chapters deal with complex issues and we have opted to allow the authorial voice to be heard and to allow disciplinary writing styles to remain as they are. This allows a very practical understanding of everyday implications to emerge.

There are many policy implications which arise from this introductory chapter and the chapters in this volume but these will take time to manifest themselves. The main point to take away is that to understand and interdict crime and in particular entrepreneurial crime we must draw on inter-disciplinary knowledge and theories of entrepreneurship and business in a wider sense.

This chapter introduces a series of apparently separate yet interconnected chapters which explore the bounds and boundaries of illegal entrepreneurship and its originality lies in its approach.

Building on previous work from Frith, McElwee, Smith, Somerville and Fairlie this chapter further explores entrepreneurship as practiced by an entrepreneur (who is also a drug dealer) in a rural, UK, northern, small-town context and how he does ‘strategy’.

This research was conducted in a broadly grounded approach using a conversational research methodology (Feldman, 1999). A series of conversations were conducted with a career drug dealer, guided by a very basic agenda-setting question of ‘how do you earn money?’ Emergent themes were explored through further conversation before being compared with literature and triangulated with third party conversations.

Implications for research design, ethics and the conduct of such research are identified and discussed. As a research project this work is protean and as a case study the generalisations that can be made from this piece are necessarily limited. Access to and ethical approval for research directly with illegal entrepreneurs is fraught with difficulty in the risk-averse environment of academia. This limits the data available directly from illegal entrepreneurs. The credibility of data collected from third parties is limited by their peripheral interest in and awareness of entrepreneurship discourse, entrepreneurial life themes and the entrepreneurial dimension to crime, as well as by the structural bias implicit in the fact that many of these third parties deal only with what might be termed the unsuccessful entrepreneurs (i.e., those that got caught!) Findings represent a tentative indication of potential themes for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues in studying hidden populations, with particular focus on methodology used to investigate ethnic minority entrepreneurs who illegally run their businesses in the UK. In this paper, on reflection, the authors look at what issues should be considered before engaging with such communities, as we identify current approaches and evaluate their merits.

Certain methodological problems are faced by researchers working with hidden populations, and this paper explores these using a sample of Ukrainian illegal self‐employed construction workers operating in London. Semi‐structured interviews with 20 Ukrainians showcase the issues raised and help illustrate the limited applicability of some commonly used research methods to ethnic minority entrepreneurship studies. The authors used an intermediary to help gain access to these illegal migrants in order to satisfy the sensitive issues of this vulnerable group of respondents.

The authors analyse the ethical considerations, problems and issues with access to such data, discuss early and more recent sampling methodologies and the ways to estimate the size of hidden population. This paper, hence, establishes the state‐of‐the‐art approaches in this field and proposes potential improvements in achieving representativeness of the data. Using the Ukrainian illegal self‐employed construction workers as an example, this paper evaluates the choices made by the researchers.

The main contribution of this paper is to showcase the methodological issues emerging when studying hard‐to‐reach groups and to emphasise the limited applicability of some methods to research on hidden populations.

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.

Attempts to theorize the relationship between the informal and the illegal sectors of the economy. States that there are significant behavioural similarities. Proposes an emergent paradigm based on dual labour market theory to explain the similarites and differences in order to guide future research in each area. Applies the theory to the production and marketing of crack cocaine and shows how the model helps us to understand issues of exploitation and risk makagement within the drug market.

In this chapter, we advance an understanding of entrepreneurial resourcefulness in relation to context by focusing on challenging and sometimes outright hostile environments and the way they shape, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial resourcefulness. Drawing on selective evidence from several projects in post-socialist countries in both Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia and other published research covering these countries, we argue for contextualized conceptualizations of resourcefulness. More specifically we emphasize that temporal, historical, socio-spatial, and institutional contexts are antecedents and boundaries for entrepreneurial behavior, while at the same time allowing for human agency. This is visible in individuals’ actions to negotiate, reenact, and cross these boundaries, and as a result, intentionally or inadvertently contributing to changing contexts. We suggest that resourcefulness is a dynamic concept encompassing multiple practices, which change over time, and it results from a close interplay of multiple contexts with entrepreneurial behavior. We also propose that from a theoretical point of view, resourcefulness not only needs to be contextualized, but it also needs to be explored together with its contextual outcomes – the value it creates and adds at different levels of society.

This chapter analyzes how patterns of political corruption across Latin America influence regional entrepreneurial activity as well as the effectiveness of different solutions that have been proposed to promote entrepreneurial initiatives. For this purpose, the causes of this institutional failure and its influence on the regional entrepreneurial system will be explored under a literature review. This review is used to identify its main issues to propose an analytical framework, based on game theory and social network analysis, to understand the dynamics of the different players involved in the interaction between the corrupt political contexts and the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem. This framework is extended to further analyze several well-known regional corrupt business cases and the suitability of different solutions to revert this failure to foster entrepreneurial initiatives with a positive developmental impact in the region.

The purpose of this paper is to focus upon organized criminals as an enterprising community and as enterprising people. Organized crime is a global phenomenon that concentrates upon the development of both sustainable personal prosperity and criminal culture as they define it. Such criminal businesses and the business of criminality go far beyond simple economic and capitalist criteria and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ability play a significant part in creating criminal wealth. Indeed, it is part of committed criminality. Whilst acknowledging the crime‐entrepreneurship nexus the literature seldom seeks to understand entrepreneurial behaviour practiced in a criminal context. This paper therefore examines entrepreneurial behaviour in criminals looking for useful theoretical perspectives and distilling key practices by seeking to understand entrepreneurial behaviour in organized criminals.

The methodological approach is a qualitative one and relies on cross disciplinary readings of the literatures of crime and entrepreneurship which are developed into a conceptual model for understanding entrepreneurial behaviour in any context. The key behavioural areas which the work concentrates upon are those of modus essendi, modus operandi and modus vivendi.

That crime and entrepreneurship are interconnected areas of human endeavour which both transcend the legal and illegal economies.

The paper is limited by its tentative and theoretical nature and by the methodology of cross disciplinary reading. Future studies are planned to test the tripartite behavioural model on real cases.

Viewing entrepreneurship (like criminality) as being a learned method of operating has serious practical implications because it concentrates upon behaviours and actions in specific contexts.

Linking this understanding to the related elements of modus vivendi and modus essendi creates a useful model for understanding entrepreneurship in any context.