The Fiddler: sociological analysis of forms of blue-collar employee theft amongst bread salesmen

This thesis attempts, to present the daily life of the bread salesman in such a way that certain key theoretical issues are explored and elaborated. This is done with an eye to allowing an ethnography to appear in the reading made by others, but I have been more concerned to produce a theoretical understanding of "fiddling”, that is, blue-collar occupational theft from customers. The analysis is based upon extended, periods of participant observation and unstructured interviewing. The analysis looks first, in Chapter Two, at the ‘moral career’ of the recruit salesman (how he is taught to fiddle), and then, in Chapter Three, at the everyday occupational structural support for fiddling which can be derived from the social context of 'service'. Chapter Four then looks at the wider industrial and economic context of occupational theft, and at possible theft types. Chapter Four includes a discussion of other (theoretically related) "part-time" crimes, and tries to show that the managerial tolerance of "inventory shrinkage” allows the deduction and theoretical proposal of both a "hidden economy", and a system of "invisible wages". Chapter Five returns to Wellbreads, the studied bakery, to see how the salesmen seem to combine possible theft types in a "portfolio" of techniques, the practice of which under guise of one of variously available "characters" protects their identities both practically and psychologically. Chapter Six considers the effect that brute occasions of enforcements have on these "partial" identities, and locates fiddling normatively as a subterranean subculture of 'business' itself. Chapter Seven, the conclusion, attempts to link up, and re-express intermediate conclusions, and suggest that they all find intelligibility in a context then defined as that of Commercial Social Control

Stabbing News: Articulating Crime Statistics in the Newsroom

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime

The Informal Economy: Threat and Opportunity in the City

The informal economy is a constant, though only partially visible, undercurrent of social and economic life of European cities. Through its more romantic and touristic guises of street trading, markets and selling roses in restaurants, its seedier links with drugs and prostitution, and the economic toe-hold it provides for immigrants, young people and students, it links with the formal economy and with the forces of formal and informal social control. It is now a major factor in the economies of European countries and in the fight against crime, particularly organised crime. Yet the extent of research on the informal economy is meagre and research has tended to remain within disciplinary and national boundaries. Leading European researchers on the informal economy were brought together to discuss the current manifestations of the informal economy and theoretical frameworks for understanding and coping with it. They also designed and oversaw two pilot projects to map the extent and nature of the informal economy in two European cities. This volume provides the first overall explanation and overview of the role the informal economy plays in Europe, through individual papers and the reports of those projects. It is essential for all those interested in the ways that European cities work; in transnational crime, including drugs; and in the economic opportunities being used by those on the margins of society

From imitation to intimidation - A note on the curious and changing relationship between the media, crime and fear of crime

Although a connection between media reports and dramatizations of crime and peoples' fear of crime is intuitively attractive, an actual relationship has been discovered surprisingly infrequently. This study (which analyses the quantitative responses of 167 respondents, and the qualitative responses of a sub-sample of 64 of them) is no exception. The qualitative material indicates that respondents' perceptions and interpretations are more important than the frequency of media consumption and/or any objective characteristics of media material

Scottish cocaine users: wealthy snorters or delinquent smokers?

Ninty-two cocaine users were interviewed in Scotland. Most were middle-class nasal users, also used other drugs and generally gave cocaine a positive rating. One half of them had at some time used cocaine more than once a week. For some, this period lasted some months, when as much as 30 'lines' of cocaine were used per day of cocaine use. More of these heavy users reported adverse effects of cocaine than was the case for light users. Nonetheless, most heavy users had reduced their use by themselves to the point that their current cocaine use was no different from that of light users. Possible explanations for this apparently spontaneous reduction are discussed

Hair testing for `ecstasy' (MDMA) in volunteer Scottish drug users

The aim of the study was to compare self reported "ecstasy" use with the results of the analysis of hair harvested from the same users. Subjects were recruited by multisite chain-referral sampling within the 1994-95 "dance scene" in Glasgow. One hundred subjects donated hair after completing a lengthy interviewer-administered questionnaire. Overall gross concordance between self reported "ecstasy" use and discovery of MDMA (or related compounds) in analysed hair did not surpass 59%, and no relationship had a Cohen's kappa of more than 0.08. Within the positive concordant dataset (n = 52), scatter was considerable, with no correlation being significant, and none more strongly positive than -0.0518. The results presented here indicate that, as far as MDMA is concerned, if judged by self-report, hair does not reach a level of apparent accuracy that would permit its use as a general population estimator. However, hair testing is probably more reliable than self-report, and its accuracy could be verified independently if large-scale inter- and intra-laboratory comparative research is conducted