Scaled Straight: The Political Economy of Scale in South African Organized Crime

• In Event: Organized Crime and Criminal Mobility

Abstract

For almost fifty years, criminologists have debated whether criminal organizations optimize their illicit operations through economies of scale, or if these organizations limit their size and bureaucratic specialization to reduce the risk of police discovery. In Donald Cressey’s classic works on La Cosa Nostra in the U.S. (1969, 1972), Cressey argued that this crime syndicate grew in size and bureaucratic rationality for much the same reasons other mid-century organizations grew and rationalized. Contrary to Cressey’s claims, some studies since have argued that constraints specific to criminal organizations move these organizations to limit or otherwise adjust the scale and rationalization of their production. Most studies that engage with criminal organizations draw on evidence from advanced industrial countries in Europe, North America and less often Northeast Asia. They ground their findings in police files and trial records as well as more limited interviews with criminal organization participants. Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork among criminal gold mining gangs and offshoots of the once-powerful Basotho Marashea ‘mafia’ in and around Johannesburg, this paper describes how the state and political economy in South Africa shape the scale of criminal organizations there in marked contrast to what is observed in the global north.

Author

• Matthew Nesvet, University of California, Davis