“You Make Me Afraid”: Status Careers in Corsican Organized Crime

Abstract

Organized crime has incommensurable impact on economies and societies, yet criminal organizations and careers have very scarcely been studied in management literature. To do so, we elaborate on the concept of status, arguing that career success in organizational crime is based on the acquisition of prestige, which connects three levels of action and sources of prestige: individual, organizational, and social. We find that in organized crime, status is empirically based on the unequal capacity to scare others. Such a capacity must be to some extent legitimate because criminal organizations do well only when embedded in local social structures. Criminal careers consist of three steps. The first is to establish oneself in the criminal world, before consolidating their status through control over their territory. Finally, criminals manage to make durable their status by investing in the legal economy. This study contributes to research on organized crime, status, and stigmatization