Introduction

This chapter discusses the institutionalisation ofillegality within a community of food producers interritories where the presence of organised crime isboth historical and endemic. The economy and itsprocesses have been mostly analysed from the pointof view of consensus and conflict theories, whichunderstand illegality as an aberration of anotherwise legal system of production and exchange.To understand illegality apart from legality – inopposition to, parallel with, or intertwined with –limits the possibility of the state being able orwilling to enforce the law. In territories whereorganised crime is a fact of life, illegality is amodus operandi on theeconomic scene, neither in opposition noran alternative to the legal economy, but simply themost viable and efficient collective system of rulesgiven the prevalent system of power in theterritory.

Organised (corporate) crime imposes purposeful order ona territory. Rather than re-appropriate resources,the goal of organised crime is to change the wayspopulations think, distorting the collectiveperceptions to believe that being ruled by clans isgood, efficient and rational. The lower the level ofcultural hegemony exerted by organised crime on aterritory, the less questioning there is of thedifference between legal and illegal behaviour. Thischapter argues that the historical presence oforganised crime in the political, social, economicand institutional fabric of a territory contributesto a blurring of this difference, to a point wherethe population in general, and entrepreneurs inparticular, do not consider legal and illegalbehaviours as oppositional. Rather, behaviours areunderstood as alternatives along a fluidlegal–illegal continuum. The relative positioningalong the continuum is never casual or arbitrary,but obeys socially constructed conventions andinstitutionalised processes.

This chapter provides a conceptual model, the Evil Trinity, which proposesthree dynamic forces behind the institutionalisationof illegality: territoriality, institutions andentrepreneurship. Examples from a case studyapproach are discussed (Yin, 2009; Smith andMcElwee, 2013), with the support of participantobservation, and structured and semi-structuredinterviews (Aoyama et al, 2010). Drawing on previousresearch by De Rosa and Trabalzi (2016), integratedwith more recent findings, the conceptual model isapplied to a typical Italian cheese – buffalomozzarella DOP – the quality of which is strictlylinked to the area of production through protecteddesignation of origin labelling.