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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.

There is little doubt that the explosive growth of the cyberspace has provided a wealth of opportunities for a broad range of legal and illegal enterprises. One of the characteristics of the cyberspace is that it removes many barriers (e.g. geographical, accessing potential customers, cost of entry) from the path of savvy entrepreneurs. As such, a new particular brand of entrepreneurs has been born – these are entrepreneurs working at the limits of legality or plainly outside any legal frameworks. The purpose of this work is to explore the area of illegal cyber-entrepreneurship and to illustrate some of the factors that have contributed to its explosive growth over the last two decades.

The work is utilising case studies drawn from literature and news sources to illustrate the theoretical concepts that are being explored. The literature consulted in this work supports the discussion around the areas of entrepreneurship, cyberspace and various aspects related to illegal exploitation of the cyberspace.

The positioning of illegal enterprises within existing theoretical frameworks is explored and a modelling of the characteristics of such enterprises is being proposed. The duality of the opportunities available within the cyberspace is illustrated, with an emphasis on the fact that there will always be a ‘gap’ between the opportunities offered by the cyberspace and the possible illegal nature of some of the entrepreneurial activities that are taking place in this space.

This work explores and positions the illegal entrepreneurial activities taking place in the cyberspace. This contributes to the advancement of knowledge in this area. Given the fast moving nature of this area, there are opportunities for updating this work on a regular basis.

To expand understanding of the motive, knowledge, and skill acquisition of criminal entrepreneurs while incarcerated and on release.

This chapter uses semi-structured interviews incorporating field observations from a convenience sample of ex-offenders in the state of Colorado, in the United States, who have been engaged in destructive entrepreneurship as well as local experts that work with ex-offenders in transition and reentry into society after a period of incarceration.

Many of these offenders’ actions outside of prison are highly entrepreneurial, with the creation of “ventures” that include production, inventory, sales, employees, managers, distribution, security, etc. When incarcerated with fellow “entrepreneurs,” tricks of the trade are exchanged producing even smarter destructive entrepreneurship upon release.

Limitations include a small sample of interviewees, responses are anecdotal, subjective truth, and localized to the state of Colorado in the United States.

The findings inform research on entrepreneurial cognition set in the destructive space, as well as reveal methods and intentions that lead to a better understanding of the “structure of the reward” for such behavior.

An examination of this behavior and underlying motives provides insights as to how society might be better prepared for and redirect destructive entrepreneurial behavior toward more positive outcomes.

The current sparse literature engaging the concept of destructive entrepreneurship generally does so at the country, institution, or corporate level. This chapter focuses on destructive entrepreneurial behavior at the individual (micro venture) level and provides recommendations for policy consideration.

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.

To explore the moral position of Baumol’s theory of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship; Ross’s (1907) concept of the ‘criminaloid’ and Sutherland’s (1949a, 1949b) theories of white-collar crime, as applied to ‘popular illegalities’ (Lea, 2003) and the activities of entrepreneurs who operate primarily as small/medium enterprise (SME); artisans; and tradespeople as they interact with an emerging affluent working class.

Provides a framework of key texts that explore the concepts of morality, legality and ethics when applied to the theoretically unexplored concept of criminal entrepreneurism, as a function of working class survival and capital accumulation. Research for this chapter included the analysis of government reports into the illicit activities of ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ bodies; personal observation of street corner shops.

Provides a critical analysis of theories that advocate rule avoidance and evasion as an acceptable process of developing successful entrepreneurs and the controversial theories of white-collar crime that focus on ‘high status’ actors operating at the corporate level. It identifies a necessary relationship and complicity between clients (victims) and practitioners as key elements in the commission of deviant acts, as victims expand their social, economic and cultural capital.

By combining philosophies of entrepreneurism, theories of white, blue and collarless crime and a reconsideration of moral business principles, this chapter introduces a new construct of deviancy as a ‘positive’ outcome that reject the need for criminal justice agencies intervention.

There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.

The aim of this chapter is to advance an understanding of the value of informal entrepreneurial activities in relation to context using an institutional perspective arguing that heterogeneity in institutional embeddedness affects the value individuals attach to entrepreneurial actions.

We draw empirically on 100 interviews with individuals engaged in informal cross-border activities in eight EU border regions across four countries that have experienced changes of regulatory, economic and social nature.

The analysis offers important insights on how three institutional logics – market, state and community – guide entrepreneurial action at the micro-level and affect value creation. Our evidence supports the use of these activities to fulfil important economic functions and to nurture family and social relations in closely-knit communities. Differences in the embeddedness of individuals in each of these logics contributed to their perception of the value of their informal entrepreneurial actions along economic and social dimensions at the individual, community and society level and also at the short and long run.

Our main contributions lie in extending discussions of economic and social value of informal entrepreneurial activities and in providing a dynamic view of the value of informal entrepreneurial activities that account for changes or shifts in institutional logics, the responses they generate and the value created as a result.

This chapter evaluates the cross-national variations in the proportion of employment that is in informal sector enterprises and evaluates competing theories which view these cross-national variations to result from either economic underdevelopment (modernisation explanation), high taxes, public sector corruption and over-regulation of work and welfare (neo-liberal explanation) or conversely, a lack of intervention in the realm of social protection (political economy explanation).

To evaluate these competing explanations, the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) country surveys that investigate the scale of employment in informal sector enterprise in 43 developing and transition economies, along with the World Bank database of development indicators, are analysed here.

The finding is that lower levels of employment in informal sector enterprises are closely associated with economic development, lower levels of public sector corruption and state intervention in the form of higher tax rates and social transfers to protect workers from poverty.

This chapter reveals the need to move beyond treating these contrasting representations as competing explanations and to recognise how all are required to more fully explain the prevalence of informal sector entrepreneurship.

Tackling employment in informal sector enterprise is shown to require broader economic and social policies associated with the modernisation of economies, tax rates, social protection and poverty alleviation.

One of the first evaluations of the competing explanations for why some countries have higher levels of employment in informal sector enterprises.

To explore and document the emerging international market for stolen tractors and plant in the United Kingdom. Whilst this may appear to be a criminological problem relating specifically to rural crime, it is a sophisticated international criminal business organised by traditional organised crime groups (OCGs) such as the Italian, Polish and Turkish Mafia’s in conjunction with a network of criminal entrepreneurs.

Using annual statistical data provided by National Farmers Union (NFU) Mutual and Plant and Agricultural National Intelligence Unit (PANIU) and other material sourced using documentary research techniques supplemented by qualitative interviews with industry specialists we present 10 micro-case studies of rural OCGs engaged in this lucrative enterprise crime. The data is verified and authenticated using narrative inquiry techniques.

There is an entrepreneurial dimension to the crime because traditional criminal families with knowledge of rural areas and rural social capital form alliances with OCGs. The practical utility of the NFU model of entrepreneurial alliances with interested parties including the police is highlighted.

Implications for research design, ethics and the conduct of such research which are identified and discussed. These include the need to develop an investigative framework to protect academic researchers similar to guidelines in place to protect investigative journalists.

An investigative framework and the adaption of the business model canvass (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) to cover illegal business models are proposed.

Suggestions are provided for the need to legislate against international criminal conspiracies.

Uses a mixture of entrepreneurship and criminological theories to help develop an understanding of the problem from an investigative perspective.