Book review: Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Essex Department of Sociology and Criminology, we are publishing a short blogpost series on books published by members of the Department. The series showcases the diverse and rich research legacy and traces an engaging history of the Department.

Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK (2013, Oxford University Press)
by Professor Dick Hobbs 

Dick Hobbs did not tell me that his book was about to come out. I was, at the time, his PhD student and I was told by someone else one day “Have you seen Lush Life yet?” and I thought they were talking about a movie. Dick Hobbs wasn’t your usual supervisor who communicated his upcoming and ongoing work or gave any reason to inquire about his writing.

We had entered Essex in January 2011, on the same day. I was starting my PhD and he had just moved from the London School of Economics and Political Science to establish our Centre for Criminology in the Department of Sociology. I applied to Essex essentially to follow him. Our first meeting in his new office was about me being told to get on with my work (on the first day…) and him placing his books on the shelves.

Lush Life is a testament to Hobbs’ vision as an academic and, at the same time, a testimony to his ability as a writer. As a sociologist – you wouldn’t want to address him as a criminologist, he wouldn’t like that – Hobbs was the one who told me repeatedly how of all the social constructions that make up the realm of criminology, organised crime was probably the one that most got on his (academic) nerves. Organised crime – which incidentally was my chosen topic of study – not only did not mean anything but was “a malady of modernity”, as he wrote. As a writer, Hobbs in Lush Life breaks down some of the formalism of academic writing, within reason of course, and shows a compelling capacity to narrate the reality through academic lenses.

To an ethnographer who had spent afternoons in Tower Hamlets’ and London East End’s pubs exploring the entrepreneurialism, the behind-the-scenes, and the contradictions of what was at the time starting to be labelled “organised crime”, the policy construction of the threat could not be more blatantly incorrect.

In Lush Life, this premise, underpinned by his observations on the field, becomes the main iconoclastic argument of the book. Hobbs’ analytical scepticism arises regarding the construction and utilisation of the concept of organised crime within political and law enforcement circles. This scepticism traces back to the dominance of Mafia-based American models of organised crime, which have become prevalent in academic and law enforcement and policing domains since their emergence across the Atlantic.

Hobbs is extremely critical (and not only in this book) of the approach by policing authorities and policymakers in the UK that tends to attribute professional and organised crime solely to certain demographics, such as immigrant communities, youth, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. In line with critical criminologists of white-collar criminality, Hobbs does not see organised crime just as a crime of deficit but rather as a crime of abundance, which can be perpetrated by individuals in privileged positions in the City of London as much as by the traders in the East End.

Hobbs gives us a raw account of those who strive to make a living within the turbulence and inequality of contemporary urban, neoliberal Britain – Hobbs’ fictional Dogtown - despite their limited opportunities.

In Lush Life the message resonates very clearly: organised crime is a policy and policing construction (as much as it is an academic one) that has been brought forward by the international calls to fight the “modern threat” of transnational organised crime. But, as Hobbs clearly states: “crime is experienced, enjoyed, acted out, and suffered locally, albeit, like the rest of late modern human existence, as the result of pressures that can be partially attributed to ebbs and flows on trade routes whose myriad of networked connections can be typified as global” (p.38-39). The concept of glocalisation, dear to Hobbs in his previous writings cannot do without that element of data grounding academic interpretation in the field.

In the field, in Dogtown, organised crime is normal and amoral; it is not tied to any ethnicity nor personal predisposition; it is the product of historical shifts in the economic, cultural and demographic aspects surrounding Dogtown. The wheelers and dealers that populate the landscape of Hobbs’ ethnography, are mystifying the effects of post-industrial capitalism, while at the same time being moved by the same greed and desires of that type of capitalism which victimises them in the first place. There’s no alien conspiracy, no “othering” that should be possible when countering organised crime in Dogtown, as the others are essentially just like us. Surely illicit activities in the neighbourhood have changed, due to historical shifts, but that does not mean that the key to understand these activities is less dependent on local interactions, quite the contrary.

Lush Life has become a classic, and not just for the style of its ethnographic work and the rawness of the data to show how crime can be normal and even “enjoyable” for those involved in it. Lush Life was also one of the last academic contributions of Dick Hobbs precisely because it says something about the type of social scientist he is, very uneasy with the recent bureaucratisation of science, of ethics in research and of the impossibility to conduct (certain) research on (certain forms) crime without apologising first. Dick Hobbs never apologised for not telling me then that his book had not come out; for him, I should have known anyway. If a researcher is seeking guidance and is open to critical thinking – as I always thought I was and am - s/he will find inspiration from those who are independent in their own interpretation of the world, like Dick Hobbs has always been. His independence shines through Lush Life.

by Professor Anna Sergi
July 2024 

• Essex Sociology celebrates 60 years