Exploring Criminal and Illegal Enterprise: NewPerspectives on Research, Policy & PracticeConversations with a ‘Small-Town’ Criminal Entrepreneur: A Case StudyMichelle Davey Gerard McElwee Robert Smith

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Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:Gerard McElwee, Robert Smith, (2015),"Towards a Nuanced Typology of IllegalEntrepreneurship: A Theoretical and Conceptual Overview", ContemporaryIssues in Entrepreneurship Research, Vol. 5 pp. 3-22 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S2040-724620150000005018Stephen Dobson, Arun Sukumar, Lucian Tipi, (2015),"Dark Matters: The InstitutionalEntrepreneurship of Illicit and Illegal Cyberspace", Contemporary Issues inEntrepreneurship Research, Vol. 5 pp. 179-201 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S2040-724620150000005014

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CONVERSATIONS WITH A

‘SMALL-TOWN’ CRIMINAL

ENTREPRENEUR: A CASE STUDY

Michelle Davey, Gerard McElwee and

Robert Smith

ABSTRACT

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

Methodology/approach � This research was conducted in a broadlygrounded approach using a conversational research methodology(Feldman, 1999). A series of conversations were conducted with a careerdrug dealer, guided by a very basic agenda-setting question of ‘how doyou earn money?’ Emergent themes were explored through further con-versation before being compared with literature and triangulated withthird party conversations.

Research limitations/implications � Implications for research design,ethics and the conduct of such research are identified and discussed. Asa research project this work is protean and as a case study the

Exploring Criminal and Illegal Enterprise: New Perspectives on Research, Policy & Practice

Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research, Volume 5, 227�251

Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 2040-7246/doi:10.1108/S2040-724620150000005020

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generalisations that can be made from this piece are necessarily lim-ited. Access to and ethical approval for research directly with illegalentrepreneurs is fraught with difficulty in the risk-averse environmentof academia. This limits the data available directly from illegal entre-preneurs. The credibility of data collected from third parties is limitedby their peripheral interest in and awareness of entrepreneurship dis-course, entrepreneurial life themes and the entrepreneurial dimension tocrime, as well as by the structural bias implicit in the fact that manyof these third parties deal only with what might be termed the unsuc-cessful entrepreneurs (i.e., those that got caught!) Findings represent atentative indication of potential themes for further research.

Keywords: Illegal entrepreneurship; criminal entrepreneurship; drugdealing; illegal entrepreneurs

INTRODUCTION

It is widely acknowledged that the study of entrepreneurship and crime hasa distinctive urban bias. As a consequence in the United Kingdom we havecome to associate criminality with low-level crime, committed by an urbanunderclass, situated within a traditional criminal fraternity, albeit anenterprise-orientated criminal elite (Hobbs, 1988). Within this criminogenicsetting criminologists and economists alike accept that the paradigm of‘entrepreneurial crime’ per-se, particularly in relation to the crime of ‘drugdealing’, offers a powerful explanatory variable; a ‘chaotic’ criminologicalframework within which there is considerable scope for a ‘criminal diversi-fier’ (Dorn, Murji, & South, 1992) to act as a free-wheeling entrepreneur.Numerous criminological studies have identified that this criminal entrepre-neur often comes from a business background and that the criminal andthe entrepreneur may emerge from the same working class social strata(Baumol, 1999). Yet, paradoxically, little consideration is given to theexistence of the ‘small-town businessman’ with a non-criminal identityhabitually engaging in criminal entrepreneurship. This is particularly trueof small-time businessmen from a rural setting. The ‘ordinary-criminal-businessman’ as opposed to the ‘ordinary-decent-criminal’ as a criminaltypology is thus an under-researched phenomenon. Indeed, only a smallnumber of studies (Steffensmeier, 1986) have considered the category ofthe atypical ‘criminal-businessman’ as opposed to the more criminogenic‘businessman-gangster’ (Smith, 2002).

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It has been suggested that this acknowledged imbalance in the literaturemay result from a lack of research access to small-town criminals. As oneof us had research access to communities where criminal activity operatedas something of an ‘open secret’ within social networks, we had an oppor-tunity to research this paradigm using the methodology of conversationalresearch (Feldman, 1999).

The focus of this chapter then is to consider the entrepreneurial practiceof a particular sub-set of illegal entrepreneurs, namely drug dealers in non-city environments; an important distinction given was that most suchresearch is focussed on criminological rather than business viewpoints andon big city contexts. The chapter does develop earlier work on illegal entre-preneurs (Frith & McElwee 2009; McElwee, 2009; Smith & McElwee,2013) and on drug dealing as a development of entrepreneurship (Fairlie,2002).

Illegal entrepreneurship is most simply defined as a process wherebyentrepreneurs supply willing customers with illegal services or products orlegal services or products using an illegal process (McElwee, Smith, &Somerville, 2011, p. 41) and illegal enterprises, for example, drug dealingand fencing (selling ‘hot’ or stolen goods), are similar in their business prac-tices to traditional forms of entrepreneurship aside from the moral or ethi-cal issues associated with them (ibid, p. 52).

The question addressed in the chapter is:

• what might a study of illegal entrepreneurship conducted in non-citycommunity contexts add to our understanding of entrepreneurship andentrepreneurial strategy-making and of the moralities and ethics of entre-preneurs, generally or in these specific contexts.

The chapter is structured as follows. Firstly, we review some of the lit-erature on entrepreneurship and on crime, based largely on the previouswork of McElwee and Smith in this area, and with a focus on the particularfeatures that have been put forward for illegal entrepreneurship and drugdealing including: (i) plurality in enterprise business strategy, (ii) how the(illegal) entrepreneur advances strategy and the impact of capital on thatprocess, and (iii) the motives and motivations that might apply to illegalentrepreneurship and drug dealing. We then set out the methodology andapproach for the field work which resulted in the case study being pre-sented, and thereafter present our case by setting it against the entrepre-neurship literature to illuminate the experiences of one career drug dealeroperating in the north of the United Kingdom. Themes are identified to

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better understand non-violent non-city based illegal entrepreneurs and howthey pursue their entrepreneurial strategies.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this review is to situate our respondent Greg1 within theconjoined literatures of entrepreneurship and criminology. The social his-tory of drug dealing particularly in urban inner cities and sink housingestates is well documented in the literature. Much of the existing contem-porary literature on illegal entrepreneurship focuses on informal entrepre-neurship, as articulated by Williams (2006, 2008), including motives andbenefits of avoiding business regulation, the revenues lost to the countryof such unregulated business, and the opportunities for drawing theseoperations into the legal sector. Other studies focus on what might betermed high-level organised criminality (Hobbs, 1988) and big city crim-inals (Highland & Dabney, 2009) and tend to focus on identifying themodes of operation, the negative effects of ‘unproductive’ entrepreneur-ship, as understood by Baumol (1990), and the policing opportunities cre-ated by better understanding how such criminals work.

On the Morality and Criminality of Entrepreneurship

The paradigm of entrepreneurship as ‘the discovery and exploitation ofprofitable opportunities for private wealth, and as a consequence for socialwealth as well’ (Venkataraman, 1997, p. 132) is deeply embedded in wes-tern thinking, along with the assumption that an economy is dependent onthe ability of entrepreneurial individuals to recognise, discover and createsuch opportunities (Murphy, Liao, & Welsch, 2006; Thurik, Wennekers, &Uhlaner, 2002; Westhead, Wright, & McElwee, 2011). This parasitic rela-tionship frames our consideration of individual creativity and innovationin the supply of goods and services (Baumol, 1990). Furthermore, asNodoushani and Nodoushani (2000, p. 9) note ‘the myth of the entrepre-neurial hero has become the context within which conventional wisdomabout entrepreneurship has been influenced’ and our societal reliance onthese ‘heroes’ seems to justify acceptance of the distinctly amoral if notimmoral and certainly self-serving entrepreneurial focus on ‘the creationand extraction of value from the environment’ (Anderson, 1995), rendering

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the entrepreneur at best a ‘creative destructor’ (Schumpeter, 1934) and atworst an ‘opportunist trader’ (Kirzner, 1973). Indeed, Chell (1985) acknowl-edges the popular British image of the entrepreneur as having much morein common with the criminal and Smith and Anderson (2003) suggest thatthe entrepreneurial and criminal constructs share a common epistemologicalheritage firmly rooted in working class mythology. In this, mythologyfigures of the ‘spiv’ and the ‘barrow-boy’ have influenced entrepreneurialiconology and the construct of the ‘bad-boy entrepreneur’ (Smith, 2013).

A study of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial behaviour, which teststhese prevailing paradigmatic assumptions, might then expect to questionthe extent to which entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship: are focused onwealth creation; are necessarily a/immoral, self-serving and opportunistic;and contribute to social and economic wealth. Given the claimed associa-tion between the two, similar questions might also then be posed for crim-inals and criminality, along with a consideration of what entrepreneurshipand criminality have in common and where they diverge. The proposal thatlegislative frameworks and ethical guidelines are capable of securing valuefrom entrepreneurial activities provides another layer of challenge to thisdebate.2

Buckley and Casson (2001) that entrepreneurship is, and has alwaysbeen, a morally ambiguous activity, thus suggesting that morality is a senti-ment amenable to individual and collective interpretation, and that entre-preneurship always involves a measure of exploitation. What is legal orillegal is dependent on the nature of the law and not on the nature of theenterprise (McElwee et al., 2011, p. 589). The general tendency to dividethe economy into ‘good’ (legal) and ‘bad’ (illegal) endures. Such categoriesmay be deeply moralistic pre-dispositions emanating from the myths wetend to hold regarding economic systems. Morals are manifestation of cul-ture whereby value judgements are not innate but are acquired (Lewis,1961). Thus, moral codes change with circumstance and are perpetuatedfor their survival value. The underlying discourse in entrepreneurship thatassumes specific forms of legally delimited economic actors, as bona fidestudy interest is contested and characterised as untenable (Rehn & Taalas,2004, p. 145).

On Risk-Taking, Taking Risks and the Law

A popular image put forward in literature is that of the entrepreneur asa risk taker. For McElwee (2008, p. 135), risk-taking is an inadequate

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definer of entrepreneurship. He suggests ‘uncertainty-bearing’ as a morerobust definition encompassing risk-taking but also activities such ascoordinating, innovating and arbitrating. Frith and McElwee (2008,p. 81) note that ‘those that advocate entrepreneurship as being ‘good’for society will not welcome those entrepreneurs who operate at themargins … (that which is) not perceived to be conducive to the publicgood … governments regulate. However, one of the defining characteris-tics of the entrepreneur, the ability to exploit opportunity … (is) likely tobe particularly accomplished when it comes to evading or circumventinggovernment regulations and laws’. There is a distinction in the literaturebetween informal economic capital and illegal outputs (Thomas, 1995).Informal operators generate legal goods and services without breachingthe law; irregulars do not register their businesses, report their output orpay taxes even though they deal in legal goods and services; criminalsfunction illegally and produce or distribute illegal goods and services.Fairlie (2002, p. 542) and Fields (1986) argue that illegal entrepreneursface several types of risks not faced by legal entrepreneurs, for example,lack of legal redress, insurance and violence from other illegalentrepreneurs.

In practice, crime and entrepreneurship are often entwined (Casson,1982), implying that ordered and complex economic behaviours exist in awider domain than is usually analysed within the entrepreneurshipresearch community (Rehn & Taalas, 2004). The apparent ‘formal’ tagin the formal economy does not rule out illegal transactions, ratherentrepreneurs and businesses are involved in series of illegality through abroad range of underhand activities (Chen, Jhabvala, & Lund, 2001).The dividing line between legality, illegality and criminality is often quitethin so that entrepreneurs operate in the shadows of or between twoworlds (Smith & McElwee, 2013, p. 116; Steffensmeier, 1986), engage inillegal pluriactivity through alternative income generation strategies tosupplement their legitimate incomes (ibid, p. 113), and improve sustain-ability via a broad range of survival strategies, closely interlinked andembedded in the household structure (Meert, Van Hulenbroeck, &Vernimmen, 2005). The farmers in Smith and McElwee’s study found itdifficult to separate their legal and illegal business operations, aspects oflegality or ‘legal enterprising’ were irrelevant and the illegal arena pro-vided an opportunity for them to practice entrepreneurship in a world inwhich opportunities to practice legal entrepreneurship were restricted(2013, p. 126).

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On Criminal and Entrepreneurial Capital

According to McCarthy and Hagan (2001, p. 1038), illegal entrepreneursutilise components of social capital as: an individual or private asset(Paxton, 1999); a group-level or community good (Sampson, Morenoff, &Earls, 1999); arising in the closeness, stability, circumscription and recipro-city of social relations found in families, intimate friendships and informalsocial organisations (Coleman, 1990); arising in larger, less intimate asso-ciations that provide new information and connections (e.g., Granovetter,1985); increasing with the size of one’s network; and increasing the prob-ability of prosperity. Criminal social capital arises from associations withother skilled offenders, delivering specialised skills and knowledge aboutoffending and is likely to contribute more to illegal success than does con-ventional capital (e.g., ties to family and years of education) (Grogger,1998; Tremblay & Morselli, 2000; Uggen & Thompson, 1999).

For McCarthy and Hagan (2001, p. 1038), personal capital is the psy-chological complement to human and social capital. It includes attitudes,tastes or preferences often evident in ‘behavioural characteristics andresources’ (Caspi et al., 1997, p. 428) such as desire for wealth; risk-takingpropensity (Fairlie, 2002; Knight, 1921, pp. 238�242; McElwee et al., 2011;Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944); a willingness and ability to cooperate(Clausen, 1991; McCarthy, Hagan & Cohen, 1998; Kuratkso & Hodgetts,1998; McElwee et al., 2011); competence, made up of intellectual capacity,dependability and self-confidence of efficacy, resilience and persisting in theface of adversity (Clausen, 1991); a sense of autonomy (Fairlie, 2002).

Oto and collegues note that each social relationship has its own short-comings as well as inherent material and immaterial costs (Flap, Kumcu, &Bulder, 1999). They quote the work of Portes (1995) who argued that inillegal entrepreneurship the lack of formal means of redress is compensatedfor with the solidarity and trust gained from their social capital network.Enforceable trust cemented by the group’s sanctioning capability increasesflexibility of transactions as well as facilitating their existence wholly out-side the limits of state regulation. An informal entrepreneurship communityis a tight-knit group, with their own moral code, where cultures of silenceand illegality take root, becoming in effect an open secret, where potentialinformants fear retribution and police are denied access to informationrequired to ‘interdict’ offenders. Smith and McElwee (2013, p. 114)note that perceptions of what constitutes criminality will be socially con-structed by the community and for Fadahunsi and Rosa (2002) illegal

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entrepreneurship is deemed morally acceptable if the law (in their case colo-nial) is not based on the values and norms of the community.

Of interest is Sarvathay (2001) in relation to ‘effectuation theory’because some entrepreneurs (like Greg) take up entrepreneurial opportu-nities irrespective of notions of moral entrepreneurship or legality startingtheir ventures with three types of ‘means’ (as opposed to capitals) (Smith &McElwee, 2013). They thus exploit contingencies open to them in their ownparticular circumstances using their social and business networks to besteffect. Aidis and van Praag (2007, p. 290) make a distinction between orga-nised and syndicate crime in which ‘organised crime’ includes predatorycrimes such as hijacking, burglary, labour and business racketeering and‘syndicated crime’ involves demand-oriented sale of illegal products andservices. Aidis and van Praag (2007, p. 286) discuss the use of intentionmodels to better understand entrepreneurial decisions and found thatexperience of illegal enterprise was quite common amongst entrepreneurs.Kim and Hunter (1993, p. 289) found that 50% of entrepreneurial propen-sity was shaped by an individual’s characteristics and attitudes.

METHODOLOGICAL MUSINGS UNDERPINNING

THE CONVERSATIONS AND THE CASE

In this section we discuss, reflect on and justify our approach and the deci-sion to use conversational methodology (Feldman, 1999) with our entrepre-neur respondent, Greg.

On Storytelling and Adopting a Social Constructionist Approach

System-level research is concerned with explaining how economic systemsfunction and the role of the entrepreneur therein. Individual-levelapproaches are focussed on discovering and describing the processes andmechanisms by which individuals turn opportunities (recognised, discov-ered or created) into viable business initiatives (McMullen & Shepherd,2006). Frith and McElwee (2008, p. 82) note that system-level research con-cerned with the function of the entrepreneur within the modern capitalisteconomy has had little to say regarding the identity of the entrepreneur,whereas ‘individual-level approaches do assume some tangible differencebetween entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs and that these differences are

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both identifiable and researchable’. In individual-level approaches then,‘the key issues are to identify a consistent set of means by which to reliablydistinguish entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs’ (ibid, p. 83). Humancapital characteristics are widely used to make these distinctions, butMcCarthy and Hagen note that this is a contested field. For example, theintuitive recognition by the entrepreneurship research community that thecharacteristics of Rotter’s (1966) ‘locus of control’ and Banduras’ (1977)self-efficacy, ‘closely resembled those of practicing entrepreneurs’ was notborne out in empirical tests that failed to consistently differentiate entrepre-neurs from non-entrepreneurs (Gartner, 1988, cited in Frith & McElwee,2008, p. 83).

For McElwee, notions of perspective and paradigm have little to say onentrepreneurship. He instead looks for the ‘world’ of the entrepreneur, aperspective from his point of view, a position from which he may ‘gaze atproblems, difficulties, aims and achievements (2008, p. 139). McElweedescribes his conversationee’s as providing him ‘with answers that are thebest they can from within their world’ and notes that within the conversa-tions he conducts with his conversationee’s different forms of knowledgeexist simultaneously. In line with the notions of socially construction, livesalter as a consequence of being conversationed and are understood in termsof rules, values and mores, and communicated through the conversationee’sinstances or realisations of that world. McElwee aims to identify commoncharacteristics as well as possible, potential activities.

The purpose of these conversations then was to elicit an interpretiveunderstanding, or verstehen (Feldman, 1997), related to the life worlds ofthe entrepreneur, their culture and their ways of being in and looking atthe world. For us it was an attempt to understand the ‘subjective’ experi-ence of our respondent by listening to the ways in which he makes sense ofthe world and ascribes and attributes value to his experiences (McElweeet al., 2011, p. 43). We adopt a social constructionist stance to develop‘new understanding of the emergence of (entrepreneurship) as social prac-tice, which may be shared through narrative accounts and interpreted asdiscourse’ representing ‘a movement away from the study of facts andtowards the study of representation’ (Frith & McElwee, 2008, pp. 86�87).

On Adopting a Conversational Methodological Approach

Conversations and anecdotes are important building blocks in theorydevelopment and form part of the ‘collaborative action research’ process

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(Feldman, 1993; Searle, 1992; Shotter, 1993) because in engaging in con-versation we are employing an important qualitative methodology andmethodological stance in order to achieve verstehen. Conversation is aprocess of coming to a shared, negotiated understanding (Gadamer,1992). Engaging in conversation is an accepted research method (Putnam,1995) often also referred to as the ‘oral-inquiry process’ (Cochrane-Smith& Lytle, 1993). We thus actively sought to engage our respondent Gregin a conversational interview (Seidman, 1991) via collaborative conversa-tion (Feldman, 1997, 1999; Paulus, Woodside, & Ziegler, 2008). McElwee(2008, p. 142) suggests that such ‘unstructured techniques seem to giveconversationees opportunities to feel free to describe their experiences insome detail without putting them under any pressure to respond in a par-ticular way, as much as practicable, or indeed to push them in any parti-cular direction’. Burrell and Morgan (1979, p. 6) stresses ‘the importanceof letting one’s subject unfold its nature and characteristics during theprocess of investigation’. The case story approach (Smith, 2004; Stake,1995; Yin, 2002) allows the researcher to incorporate knowledge fromeveryday experience and from sources who do not wish to be officiallyacknowledged. We conducted several conversations including long andserious (Feldman, 1996) and reflective (Carini, 1986) elements and indoing so helped Greg discover biographical connection (Hollingsworth,1994). In the process a genuine dialectical learning experience occurredwhereby both parties gained from the experience in a manner akin to‘closing the hermeneutical circle’ by sharing knowledge and achieving ver-stehen (Feldman, 1997). The conversations unfolded as a form of criticalinquiry (Feldman, 1999; Fleming, Gaidvs, & Robb, 2003).

Denzin and Lincoln (2000, p. 14) argue that ‘individuals are seldomable to give full explanations of their actions or intentions. All they canoffer are accounts, or stories, about what they did and why. Throughoutthis process of methodogenic redescription (Garfinkel, 2002), both theconversationer and the conversationee create, develop and adapt storiesto re-tell and ‘relate’ them to their audience, and in so doing the storyinevitably alters and evolves for both teller and receiver. This does notmean that the conversationer is being deceived by the stories he is beingtold. Berger (1963) argues that deception in a process of construction, ormaintaining ulterior motives, requires a degree of psychological controlof which, few are capable’. However, for the researcher, McElwee (2008,p. 138) notes the importance (and difficulty!) of avoiding the temptationto hold such individuals and their stories up as representative examples

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of group, organisational, industry or societal features (Low &MacMillan, 1988, p. 151).

In many respects the conversations took the form of a ‘reflective ethno-graphy’ (Smith & McElwee, 2013), drawing on memories to reconstructsocial texture (Bryman, 2008) in which Greg reflected on his life, his experi-ences of business and crime and made sense of it both for us and himself.In the prolonged conversations which ensued with the respondent, wetouch upon the socio-biographical and the genre of the criminal biographyand oscillate between the forms and styles of biography (Smith, 2013,p. 323). Indeed, the conversations are a mixture of the ‘memoir’ in whichhe narrates his life of crime in the context of his life story. It is not a gang-ster story and we did not get a sense of it being a selective story.3

Articulating Our Approach to the Conversational Method

As was articulated earlier, an opportunity arose to converse with a small-town businessman whom we knew to be a drug dealer. The approach takenwas a generally grounded one and consciously co-constructed as far aspractical. The generic entrepreneurship and ethics literature is well-established, and was familiar to the researchers, but no further reading wasundertaken by the field worker on the particulars of illegal entrepreneur-ship, entrepreneurial crime or drug dealing prior to the initial field worktaking place.

We were interested in taking what steps were practical to develop alevel playing field between the two participants in the conversation interms of the a priori knowledge which informed the initial conversation.With this in mind the interviewer organised her existing understanding ofthe generic entrepreneurship and ethics literature into themes and setthese themes out on fifteen cards each containing a key word/phrasefrom that literature. These cards were set out on the table as an aidmemoir style guide to the conversation (see Table 1). As well as ‘publish-ing’ the field worker’s background understanding, these cards acted as anagenda for the conversation.

Beyond this visual device, and an introductory section of biographygathering (‘tell me a bit about you, your upbringing and so on’), onlyone question guided the conversation namely ‘how did you earn money?’.

The first conversation with Greg resulted in a one hour audio tape, con-ducted in two parts over the same evening. Having transcribed the

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conversation the field worker conducted a thematic coding of the data toidentify emergent themes which became: skills and personality, choices,boundaries, business development processes/decisions and networks(Table 2).

The research team then identified a set of substantive themesaround the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial strategy-making litera-ture: entrepreneurial orientation, business skills, networks, opportunityrecognition (and planning ahead) and the data was mapped against thesethemes. Through this method the research made use of both inductive anddeductive components to analyse and develop meaning from the data.Having captured Greg’s general story, a second conversation explored thesubstantive themes a little further. Again a set of ‘cards’ acted as visualagenda-setting prompts, 11 cards this time.

This conversation resulted in a 90-minute tape conducted in two partsover the same evening and was then analysed against the substantivethemes. The resulting information was added to the findings initiallydeveloped. We also produced a ‘profile’ of the respondent based on thesame transcripts plus information collected from others in the localcommunity.

Table 2. Aid Memoir/Agenda-Setting Cards � Set Two.

Strategies Extracting Value

from the

Environment

Entrepreneurship

Versus

Management

Planning and managing Innovating Who I am

Decision making Recognising opportunities What I know

Timescales Developing opportunities Who I know

Networks Risk and failure

Table 1. Aid Memoir/Agenda-Setting Cards � Set One.

Ethics Entrepreneurship Strategy-Making

Dilemmas Skills and knowledge Decision points

Duties Education Priorities

Principles How people helped Critical issues

Choices Supply chain Aims

Consequences Community

Trust

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Greg’s Story (a Personality Profile Drawn from the Conversations andInformation from Other Members of the Community)

Greg has spent his adult life in a typical northern English semi-rural town,having spent his childhood in a similarly typical northern English industrialtown that was decimated in the 1980s (Greg’s teenage years) and now reliesmore on call centres and retail than industry.

Greg is not an archetypal criminal, nor an archetypal drug dealer, asreflected in the literature. He comes across as a fairly typical Joe in hislocale. As a businessman he describes himself as being ‘More GordonRamsey than Pablo Escobar’ (laughing at the analogy). He is the antithesisof the ‘gangster’ and ‘hard-man’ stereotypes usually associated with drugdealing. He is a fairly typical family man and family and morality are veryimportant to his self-identity. Physiologically, he is described as being cute,attractive and sincere; a nurturing peacekeeping type, rather than a ‘bolshy’alpha-male. He is a social facilitator, hosting and connecting with andbetween people in his social network. Sociality (and being sociable) is inte-gral to his entrepreneurial modus operandi (see Smith, 2013 for a discus-sion of the links between entrepreneurial propensity and sociality). He hasa creative streak, enjoying pottery music and cooking.

This nurturing character has another side which might be described as‘protector’. Maintaining a background position he subtly scans his environ-ment, always aware of and alert to what is going on in a space. He is notafraid to stand his ground or defend his ‘tribe’ (Gilbert, 2010) when needed.He also joins ‘the lads’ for nights of football and beer in which they havebeen known to go missing for a whole weekend.

His drugs business consists of growing and selling cannabis. His legaland informal business centres on buildings, supplemented by other oppor-tunistic business ventures. He also undertakes party organising, which crossall three business boundaries (legal, informal and illegal). He ‘comes-and-goes’ and ‘wheels-and-deals’ going with the flow of whatever emerges at thetime and thrives on a constant succession of ‘project type’ work and busi-ness ventures. Semiotically, he presents as a small-town entrepreneur andnot a criminal.

Greg does not follow the typical criminal stereotype as described bySmith (2013, p. 317). He did not lack educational opportunity, was notraised in abject poverty, nor subjected to poor housing, or environment.It is not a confusing ‘bi-lingual discursive’ story (Sandberg, 2009), whichoften occurs when the same people use contrasting discourses. Gregappears to be comfortable in both worlds.

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FINDINGS

Extracting Themes from the Conversation

To organise the findings around the two sets of thematic coding/analysis(see the section ‘Methodological Musings Underpinning the Conversationsand the Case’), the emergent themes were grouped into the substantiveones (Table 3).

This section sets out the findings for each of the substantive themes.

Business Skills

Greg appears to display some atypical entrepreneurial characteristicsand skills for both legal and illegal business. He appears confidently self-sufficient across the range of business functions, which he describesseamlessly across the legal/illegal boundary; ‘I can be self-sufficientcompletely in terms of production, distribution, storage, financing andmaking your money look legal’ … ‘see things from conception tocompletion … organising … coordinating’ … He feels competent in work-ing out margins, pricing, logistics, is a natural salesman, has the ‘gift of thegab’, and is not scared to negotiate or stand up for himself or others (parti-cularly key to illegal business practice). Evaluating opportunities and risksand continuous improvement seem to take up much of his thinking, and hetakes an ‘artisan’ approach to his products. Typical of serial entrepreneurs,he has the drive to create; ‘I thrive on the challenge of a newbusiness … getting something up-and-running from scratch… that’s whatdrives me’, but acknowledges that he is not motivated by growing the busi-nesses on, remarking on the headaches of ‘more jobs running, more staff todeal with their issues… it just scales up and intensifies … wears you

Table 3. Mapping of Emergent Themes to Substantive Themes.

Emergent Themes Substantive Themes

Skill, management, organising/coordinating, problem solving Business skills

Personality, motivation, illegal entrepreneurship, knowledge,

necessity driven, opportunity driven, risk

Entrepreneurial orientation

Networks, trust Networking

Fortuitous discovery, active search, opportunity creation Opportunity recognition

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down … some people thrive on it, but … I’ve never been that strict withmyself … I’ll just stop and do something else’.

Entrepreneurial Orientation

Greg’s formative years point to development of an internal locus of controland entrepreneurial creativity and confidence. Because his parents were lar-gely unavailable to him during his growing up he ‘spent a lot of time look-ing after myself … having to develop enough self-confidence to get on’. Hejoined a macho male manufacturing environment at 16 where he learnedthat ‘you have to be bigger than yourself, just so you don’t get … pushedabout’. Now when ‘people ask me to do something which I’d not alreadydone … I’d be thinking ‘I’ll have a go, yea I can do it yea’. He remarks, ‘Iget bored easily … I have to do things that’s going to fire myimagination … it’s a constant challenge … effort … in the hope of the endresult being as good as it can be’ … ‘its not just about making money forme and it never was. I love the … scientific side … its brilliant’.

He attributes business failure to influences beyond his control (recession,increased competition, lack of customer spending power, gangs fighting forterritory, others’ unwillingness to invest, etc.). He is uncomfortable withemployment and feels exploited in this environment ‘I always seem to feelthat I’m doing better for them than they’re doing for me’. He is self-taughtin skills needed as he needs them. He is motivated to make his own and doit himself rather than buying from others.

He has a capacity to live with risk; ‘it’s to do with your own personalcapability of dealing with living on the wrong side of the law’ … being‘aware of what’s going on around you … I don’t scare as easy as most peo-ple’. In common with the criminal he is motivated by the buzz ‘that adrena-lin rush … when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be … that’s as highas you’ll ever get’, but he is careful in relation to managing risk, joking that‘I’m too pretty to go to prison’. It seems likely then that Greg’s resilience indealing with risk enables him to pursue illegal business practices whereothers, faced with the same information, may not (Frith & McElwee, 2008).

Networking

Greg is philosophical. He tests and develops trusted networks. School‘taught me … who you develop as a friend, and the people you can

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trust … and who you can’t … if … they decide to let you down … they’renot my mate next week’. While still a teen he negotiated with the relative ofa friend to fence stolen goods. In his early years of employment, he culti-vated contacts to move up the career ladder. Later, on the other side of thelaw, he apprenticed himself within a close-knit network of older men fromdoing community service.

In relation to illegal entrepreneurship his motto is ‘once bitten twiceshy’. He has developed a tight network of close ties who ‘you can actuallytrust … never to drop the ball or never to mess you about or never to fuckthings up for you in any way’. Then across his businesses, he uses a widerrange of contacts who he doesn’t keep in touch with regularly, but who hehas no hesitation calling on to barter transactions with on a karma typebasis (do good when you can and good will come back at you). It seemslikely that access to this long-invested in, trusted and wide ranging networkmight encourage business ventures to be pursued that require high levels ofdiscretion.

Opportunity Recognition

Greg has an obvious talent in and alertness to recognising opportunitiesand orientation in acting to take these forward into businesses. As a kid hesaw things that ‘might be worth something or useful’ and developed an out-let for these through networking. He is adroit at noticing potential marketfor products and services, working out what margin could be made andhow to do it. He keeps his eyes open for money making ventures within hisrealm of competence and focuses his time and attention on those he thinkshe will enjoy. He assesses opportunities based on risk, trust and potentialmargins. ‘I’ve got a lot of ideas of what I want to do or can do or shoulddo to make some money or to keep me interested or from a business pointof view … I get into them on an even keel and see which I naturallyfollow … enjoying being interested in the most … coming back to as anopportunity … exciting me … something I want to get out of be in a morn-ing and get into … then I’ll start ringing round and getting contacts … I’lluse contacts … get a definitive answer … get the problem solved’.

The legality or otherwise of the opportunities being pursued is significantto Greg in terms of the different risks involved and the need to have accessto ‘legitimate’ funds (a need which he limits through the structuring of hislifestyle and of the community). Other apparent drivers for Greg operatinga plurality of business practice, such as weathering changing economic

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conditions, maintaining an interesting, stimulating portfolio, spreadingfinancial risk and investment do not the most part seem conditional on thelegal/illegal split, and that distinction seems blurred if not invisible in theprocess.

ANALYSIS

The entrepreneurship literature suggests that the entrepreneur might beseen as a hero, wealth generator, value extractor, creative destructor,opportunist trader, bad-boy, a/immoral, self-serving, risk-taking, uncer-tainty-bearing, co-ordinator, innovators, arbitrator or craftsman.

Greg has certainly been a bad-boy (Smith, 2002) in his time, is anopportunist and displays significant business acumen. He is constantlyseeking new opportunities to earn money and to pursue interesting endea-vours. However he also displays a strong sense of morality which is visi-ble throughout his strategy-making and business operations. He does notseem to be self-serving, an extractor or destructor in the sense in whichthat term seems to be used in the entrepreneurship literature. He is a per-sonal wealth creator to a modest extent, but there is much evidence forhis balancing of economic interests (having enough money to get by on,surviving the hard economic times and having a little bit extra in thegood times), with social interests, the desire for a pleasurable lifestyle,intrinsic work motivations, keeping the risks to himself, his family andhis network down and creating a lifestyle that is stimulating, inspiring,self-directed and facilitates his family needs and his personal interests.There is also evidence of a desire to be part of a network of friends (acommunity?) who help and support each other and he seems to takepleasure in the barter style giving and receiving of skills, information,effort, services and pleasures.

There is significant evidence that Greg is uncertainty-bearing, a co-ordinator, innovator, arbitrator and craftsman. He is certainly very focusedon noticing and innovating to respond to market changes, and market-related opportunities, and on creating, designing and operationalisingprojects to meet new niches that appear, whether externally, through newmarket opportunities, or capacity based, for example, a new use for hisskills or physical resources. Risk-assessment and risk-management isstrongly present in his strategy-making, as is the coordination of people,resources and timescales to ensure that supply meets demand, productmeets expected quality standards etc.

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Maintenance of social capital and contacts, networks, ambition to dosomething with his life, pursuit of legitimacy and reputation building areall high priorities for Greg. Diversification, cultivation of new niches anddual legal and illegal income streams, adaptation and the associated devel-opment of dual personality and multiple lives are all key elements in his lifestory, but the notion of rapid expansion of his business empire is not.Indeed, he shows deliberate strategies to keep the business small, niche,controllable and in so doing managing both the risks and the hassles asso-ciated with business practice.

Greg can certainly be described as confident and this quality seems tohave developed from an early age and from a background of stability. Hisadult life displays many examples of confidence in his abilities, believing hecan do whatever he puts his mind or hands to.

There seems also to be surprisingly little evidence of an anti-establishment attitude (Smith & McElwee, 2013) in the usual sense, whichis perhaps counter intuitive for someone involved in illegal practices. In hisearly adult life, he pursued a very traditional industry-based career. Inaddition, with his legal business, he seems perfectly at ease paying his wayin terms of taxes, insurances etc. and dealing with the mainstream econ-omy. Indeed he seems broadly supportive of taxation and the generalnotion of being ‘governed’. He also seems to bear no malice to the prosecu-tion system in terms of the punishment he received for his early criminality.However, he does display a desire for independence in the much more prac-tical sense of control of his work environment and earnings, in the sense ofbeing ill-at-ease working for others and dissatisfied with the remunerationreceived for the amount of effort he feels he has put in to these workplaces.This seems to have more to do with what might be termed an internal locusof control, a desire to define his own goals and identities and perhaps witha sense of confidence or of superiority. Or it may signal fit with the notionof a distorted view of interdependence (Yochelson & Samenow, 1977). Thisfactor doesn’t seem to cause him to reject such work as he regularly returnsto workplace environments as part of his pluralistic earning pattern,although he does seem to leave them again fairly quickly, demonstrating apreference for more self-directed work environments.

His early motivations for criminal activities were to do with earningmoney (‘you needed more income as a young guy than you were getting’),and excitement ‘it’s the best high you’ll ever have’ and in terms of gettinginto drug dealing, drug taking was part of the motivation ‘for most people,once you notice your personal consumption’s costing you more than youcan afford, the only way round that is to get a little bit extra and pass it

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on, and your bill then for your own personal amount starts to drop’. Hedisplays a strong element of pride in his abilities and his reputation, andseems to hold a position of respect in his social environment as might beexpected of a stable, reasonably successful, family man approaching theage of ‘elder’ in a community.

Greg’s illegal business fits best with Smith’s (2013) notion of ‘illicit’enterprise; demand orientated, illegal but not predatory. It fits withHaller’s (1990) definition of illegal business and McElwee et al.’s (2011,p. 41) characteristics of the illegal sector reflect some important aspects ofthis business context, in particular:

• Its connection to the formal, modern, capitalist economy � visible in itsbusiness model, issues of supply chain, organisation and coordination,supply and demand, ‘contracting’ and ‘negotiating’ (albeit both on avery informal basis, and enforced by community rather than courts inthis case). The lack of protection in the sector is of course significant inthis regard.

• It does seem to be broadly available to any who have the entrepreneurialcapacity and choose to engage in it, and it is interesting that just as entre-preneurship is said to be better defined by notions of creativity than ofgetting rich, so, in this entrepreneur’s experience, those who focus on thefinancial end result at the expense of applying expertise and effort to theprocess, tend to do less well.

• And it is an entrepreneurial process.

It does seem that much that is explanatory in this case is related to theidea of understanding the entrepreneur’s ‘world’ as expressed by his pro-blems, difficulties, aims, achievements and by the idea of entrepreneurshipas a process or method of operating, which is indeed, for Greg, very similarin its legal as its illegal manifestation, and of the necessity of having pluralbusinesses, and, in this case, specifically having some legal and some illegaltrading. But also, the non-financial benefits of having several businessinterests.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

The dividing line between legality, illegality and criminality is often quitethin, which, perhaps, explains why in some countries, depending on thecontext, existing laws and regulations are selectively enforced or not

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enforced at all (Chen, Jhabvala, & Lund, 2001). The main finding of thisstudy is that criminal entrepreneurs (like Greg) in non-city settings,engaged in low-level drug dealing as part of a portfolio lifestyle businessmay offer an alternative perspective to the mainstream research in thisarea. Greg certainly seems to display many of the typical characteristic,skills and orientations attributed to entrepreneurs, and some that are sug-gested as being key to illegal entrepreneurship in particular. The findingstentatively suggest that such entrepreneurs may feel ‘forced’ to operate out-side the law and may be relatively untouched by organised crime, but with-out the protection of the law are stimulated to define their own moralboundaries to their business practice. Consequentially, this chapter hasexplored the experiences of a ‘small-town’ entrepreneur doing business onboth sides of the legal boundaries of business (all three sides if we includethe category of ‘informal’ business in the mix). In gathering his storiesabout ‘doing-business’, we explored how his experiences map against tradi-tional entrepreneurship and illegal entrepreneurship literature, the impactthat operating outside the law might have on entrepreneurial business prac-tice and how illegal entrepreneurship of this type might coincide with anddiffer from the established literature. Of particular significance is the tenta-tive finding that it seems possible from this story at least, and in this semi-rural context at least, that notions of legality have marginal relevance,limited to consequential considerations (the likelihood of getting caughtand likely effect of sanctions applied by the state on the self and depen-dents). These considerations are themselves are only one of a set of eco-nomic and social considerations (earning a living, maintaining self-respect,supporting a family and a lifestyle) on which earning decisions are beingbased. The moralities that individual laws partially codify are relevant tothis entrepreneur’s decision making, but again are assessed independentlyand alongside a whole set of moral considerations set in a social context.Significantly, the a/immoral exploitative norms assumed for entrepreneursand criminals alike were difficult to find in this story. Instead we found astrong sense of balancing a range of social and psychological needs andnurtured community networks representing something of a ‘whole life,whole community’ type focus more reminiscent of notions of sustainabledevelopment than of the exploiting entrepreneurial parasite. This commu-nity seems to support and reinforce its own sets of values such that thelegal, informal and illegal distinctions are not only blurred but barely visi-ble in the community narrative, actions and judgements, whereas moralitiessuch as community and family cohesion and social lifestyle issues are at theforefront of dialogue and decision making. Furthermore, it might be

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posited that community collusion and investment in the illegal aspects ofbusiness practice lessens the potential of getting caught thus further redu-cing the relevance of that consideration. The particular experiences of anentrepreneur running a portfolio of business opportunities spanning legaland illegal business is significant in its ability to illuminate, through thestories told by that entrepreneur, how business practice might differbetween the legal and illegal components, as well as what might motivateoperating in either sector.

NOTES

1. Names, dates and locations have been changed.2. This study makes a very small contribution to these challenging and under-

researched issues by looking at entrepreneurship as observed through entrepreneur-ial strategy-making and focuses on a particular sub-set of illegal entrepreneurship,non-predatory, non-violent drug dealing.3. Memoirs are important social ethnographies because they are generally nar-

rated with honesty and are set within their sociological milieu and upbringing andembed morality within them.

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