On March, 29th at 1.30, Federico Varese (University of Oxford) will join us to give a guest lecture on:
The Study of Extra-legal Governance: Challenges and Some Tentative Solutions
This talk will address the conceptual, theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of extra legal organizations such as organized crime and Mafias. Federico will address the conceptual confusion over key definitions in this field, and offer a framework for the study of extra-legal phenomena, which places this field firmly within mainstream economic sociology. Federico will then discuss the importance of protection theory to understand the behaviour of organizations that try to govern territories and markets, such as States and Mafias. Finally, Federico will address research design and data collection challenges. In particular, Federico will stress the importance of ‘not selecting on the dependent variable’, and the possibilities afforded by the quantification of court records, in particular the application of quantitative content analysis, correspondence analysis and social network analysis. Federico will mainly draw upon his own research results.
Federico is among the best scholars on mafias, which he studies from a sociological perspective.
Practical details can be found here.
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