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British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on October 25, 2006
British Journal of Criminology 2006 46(6):1011-1036; doi:10.1093/bjc/azl082
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The British Journal of Criminology 46:1011-1036 (2006)
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Moral Economy of Everyday Crime

Markets, Consumers and Citizens

Susanne Karstedt and Stephen Farrall*

* Centre for Criminological Research, Institute of Law, Politics and Justice, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, England; Prof. Susanne Karstedt, s.karstedt{at}keele.ac.uk; Dr Stephen Farrall, s.d.farrall{at}keele.ac.uk.

Between the crimes in the suites and the crimes in the streets lies the mostly unexplored terrain within which we find crimes of ‘everyday life’. Not all of these are formally illegal, but all are generally seen as morally dubious. Most of the crimes of everyday life are committed in the contemporary marketplace, and by those who think of themselves (and are mostly considered by others) as respectable citizens. We contextualize normative orientations that are conducive to such types of behaviour using a framework that links E. P. Thompson’s (1963) concept of the ‘moral economy’ with Institutional Anomie Theory (Messner and Rosenfeld 1994, 2007). Findings from a comparative survey study in three economic change regions (England and Wales, Western and Eastern Germany) show that a syndrome of market anomie comprising distrust, fear and cynical attitudes toward law increases the willingness of respectable citizens to engage in illegal and unfair practices in the marketplace.


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