Abstract
The network perspective as an analytical tool for research on drug trafficking is discussed, including Morselli’s network analysis methods. The research question is explained: what is the collective value of ethnic homogeneity among BCB high-level drug trafficking, and how is it manifested in the BCB network structure and networking processes? The main hypothesis used and the grounds for choosing Bouchard’s market resilience framework are provided. Different types of evidence that are sought are discussed, as are the theories of collective action, social capital, and trust used to analyse the evidence. Burt’s (The Network Structure of Social Capital. In I. S. Robert, M. S. Barry, & C. T. Greenwich (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behaviour (Vol. 22, pp. 345–423), 2000) work on network brokerage and closure are pertinent to the analysis of qualitative evidence of criminal entrepreneurship, relational data, and network properties.
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Notes
- 1.
Soudijn and Kleemans (2009) argue that the literature on ethnic organised crime put heavy emphasis on ethnic homophily and ethnic closure. The author does not disagree with this suggestion in general but sees the need to make a clarification: it is the way in which such emphasis is conducted that requires improvement. As noted in the sections preceding this footnote, much of the focus on the elements of ethnic closure and homogeneity rely merely on poor data, metaphors, and assumptions.
- 2.
It should be noted that Nozina (2010) examined crime networks amongst Vietnamese diaspora in the Czech Republic. However, the study’s drug trafficking section is not sufficiently useful in the context of this discussion.
- 3.
Similar limitations apply to Chin and Zhang’s (2015) research into the Chinese heroin trade in Asia. Through their own admission, ‘[o]nly a few subjects provided complete descriptions of their trafficking operations. Most stories we gathered pertained to only limited or specific segments of the trafficking enterprise, which engendered our primary belief that drug trafficking was mostly fragmented and controlled by many players at different stages. It is possible that some well-organized trafficking groups were able to coordinate long-distance operations and to transport drugs from the source to street vendors... For obvious ethical and safety reasons, we did not attempt to follow a trafficking operation from start to finish’ (ibid.: 21–22).
- 4.
Bouchard (2007: 328–9) explains the end goal of decreasing drug use via the disruption of the drug network and market as follows: ‘First, removing dealers (and the drugs they supply) from a market means that their customers may have more difficulty acquiring drugs and consequently consumption would decrease. Seizures function similarly in that they are supplied to prevent users from purchasing a certain amount of drugs. Second, external shocks might impede the functioning of the market by deterring current and potential dealers from pursuing their activities or from entering the trade. Successfully deterring active and potential dealers would further prevent user and dealer transactions, would increase drug prices and would decrease drug use.’
- 5.
Others have also used the concept of resilience to examine criminal networks, for instance, Bakker et al. (2012), Lauchs et al. (2012), and Duijn et al. (2014). However, Bouchard’s (2007) study most closely aligns with the aim and objectives of this study for several reasons. His resilience theory provides the most well-structured and multi-layered framework relative to the segmented points offered by the others. Bouchard’s (2007) paper focuses exclusively on drug markets, which is salient to this study, whereas the discussion of organisational (e.g. integration and differentiation) and governance-related (legitimacy) mechanisms in other studies are not as relevant. Lastly, Bouchard’s (2007) study is relevant to the type of data used in this study—qualitative data that show the intricacies of social relations and processes.
- 6.
There exists no evidence that the middle or lower portions of the Canadian heroin market were controlled by any single criminal collective in the 1990s. In fact, the livelihood of those market segments was very much dictated by the availability of supplies organised by the BCB, and each BCB clique had distributors who were of younger age and without BCB background. Therefore, it would be appropriate to say that it did not make sense to demarcate between the BCB’s dominance in upper-level trafficking and their domination of the entire market, since they were responsible for the heroin supplies of the whole of Canada.
- 7.
See Morselli (2009: 5–9) for a brief account of previous research that have contributed to the formulation of his criminal network framework.
- 8.
Taking after Morselli (2009: 67), the term facilitator is ‘used to represent participants in criminal activities who assist in supplying an illegal commodity or service.’
- 9.
As Desroches (2007) notes , the police and some researchers are naturally wary of such depiction of high-level traffickers as being less than ultra-violent. A good example is shown by an excerpt from O1 (IRB 2008) in Volume I, where he rebuked the suggestion that criminal organisations may be solely distinguished on the basis of their division of labour, since they rely on violence to control and discipline the organisational members’ conducts. Nevertheless, it is one thing to understand the similar degree to which traffickers can be violent at both higher and lower levels of the drugs trade, but it is another to acknowledge how violence varies in its rate of prevalence between different market segments.
- 10.
CPR is defined by Ostrom (1990) as natural or man-made resource system sufficiently large so that excluding potential beneficiaries becomes costly. It has a finite quantity, meaning it is prone to crowding effects and over-usage, unlike pure public goods such as security or weather forecast. The structure of the resource system may come as a by-product of extended use and careful observations through the process of trial and error. Inevitably, and by definition, this process involves errors. The recognition and desire to address collective action problems depend on the principals’ perception of the degree to which future benefits is discounted, based on their experience with and understanding of CPR.
- 11.
In studying CPR situations, the researcher’s task is to learn about the structures of the problems the collective faced and why the rules they adopted seem to work (Ostrom 1990)—for instance, the structure of the resource itself such as size, clarity of boundary, internal structure; flow patterns involved in the resource units such as predictability over time and space, and in quantity. These are the types of information which criminologists find hard to obtain, as Bouchard (2007: 326) cogently explains: ‘The truth is that the impact of law enforcement on illegal drug markets is not fully understood. One reason is that we will have poor knowledge of the markets themselves. Raw numbers are available with regard to the number of drug dealers arrested and the quantities of drugs seized in specific locations. However, the extent to which arrests and seizures destabilise these specific markets, or impede their functioning, is unknown. Critical information for evaluating law enforcement interventions, such as a good knowledge of the size of the market (how many dealers are there?) and the structure of the distribution networks (how concentrated is this market?), are rarely available to researchers.’ Fortunately, similar types of data comparable to Ostrom’s (1990) CPR studies were acquired for this study which included the following: how reliant players were on resources according to different circumstances; the risks involved in various types of resource allocation schemes; prior norms of behaviour as disposition to solving the problems; the rules devised by the collective and the design or emergent principles; and how they maintained the CPR successfully collectively.
- 12.
There are numerous studies that draw comparisons between criminal and legitimate entrepreneurs, but in doing so few refer to the rich academic literature on entrepreneurship in business. For an example of a study of drug trafficking based on legitimate entrepreneurship functions, see Frith and McElwee (2007).
- 13.
The phrase ‘do better’ here is taken to mean ‘performance.’
- 14.
See Burt (1992) for an in-depth reading of his theory on structural hole.
- 15.
For in-depth reading on the topic of trust, see Gambetta (1988).
- 16.
Complete and exclusive self-interest is not a presumed condition of trust under discussion for, as Dasgupta (1988) notes, there are always applicable instances where factors of egoism and altruism come into play.
- 17.
- 18.
Varese (2010: 13) suggested an angle which would enable one to generate hypotheses in network-related studies—by addressing the ‘problem of enforcing deals and promises among criminals in the absence of third-party enforcers.’ Researchers from various fields have contributed to the study of such informal systems of governance, where the enforcement of transactions is principally through punishment by refusing future interaction.
- 19.
For further reading on the usefulness of credit on an operational level and as an exchange mechanism, see Moeller and Sandberg (2015).
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Chung, A. (2019). Theoretical Frameworks and Concepts. In: Chinese Criminal Entrepreneurs in Canada, Volume II. Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05135-8_2
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