Damaged hardmen: Organized crime and the half- life of deindustrialization

Abstract

Despite frequent associations, deindustrialisation features rarely in studies of organised crime, and organised crime is at best a spectral presence in studies of deindustrialisation. By developing an original application of Linkon's concept of the ‘half-life’, we present an empirical case for the symbiotic relationship between former sites of industry and the emergence of criminal markets. Based on a detailed case-study in the west of Scotland, an area long associated with both industry and crime, the paper interrogates the environmental, social and cultural after-effects of deindustrialisation at a community level. Drawing on fifty-five interviews with residents and service-providers in Tunbrooke, an urban community where an enduring criminal market grew in the ruins of industry, the paper elaborates the complex landscapes of identity, vulnerability and harm that are embedded in the symbiosis of crime and deindustrialisation. Building on recent scholarship, the paper argues that organised crime in Tunbrooke is best understood as an instance of ‘residual culture’ grafted onto a fragmented, volatile criminal marketplace where the stable props of territorial identity are unsettled. The analysis allows for an extension of both the study of deindustrialisation and organised crime, appreciating the ‘enduring legacies’ of closure on young people, communal identity and social relations in the twenty-first century.