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Indeed, it was not only in the US that something new about how to study mafia was in the making. Since the 1960s, the social study of mafia and mafia-like organizations had experienced a sort of turn. In those years, foreign scholars of Sicily, ‘swayed by that decade’s profound distrust of policing institutions’, began to do research on mafia conceived ‘with a small m and without the definite article’ (Schneider 2008, 550–1). Rather than a criminal association with clear boundaries, rules and goals, mafia was now seen as the sum of individual mafiosi wielding power through their skills, including the ability to use private violence. This reading has been highly influential, and we could say that mafia studies definitely came of age in the 1970s with the publication, one after the other, of three outstanding and seminal contributions to the social science literature on mafia in Europe and especially in Sicily: Hess (1970), Blok (1974), Schneider and Schneider (1976). To them we could also add dalla Chiesa (1976) and Arlacchi (1983b [1980]), the two first substantial contributions to mafia studies from Italian sociology after the demise of the discipline in Italian culture (and academia) in the 1920s and its recovery in the 1950s (for a sociohistorical portrait of Italian sociology from its inception to the 1950s, see Santoro 2013).

What had already been happening in the US beginning in the 1950s was also starting to happen in Italy, however. After decades in which it was difficult to even assert the existence of something like the mafia in Italian courts, in the 1980s and 1990s some brave Sicilian prosecutors, responding to the mafia’s assumption of a commanding role in trafficking heroin to the US, were able to ‘turn’ several mafiosi into justice collaborators, eliciting ethnographically rich personal narratives. (Palermo-based Tommaso Buscetta was the first of these, offering testimony to the prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who was assassinated in 1992.) This and a corresponding citizens’ antimafia movement encouraged new research, much of it by Sicilian scholars, which revealed that the mafia had a greater institutional capacity than had been imagined before (see Jamieson 1999; Schneider and Schneider 2003; Santino 2009; Rakopolous 2017; Ben-Yehoyada 2018). This section is devoted to this double, partly contradictory move.

A German sociologist, Henner Hess published in 1970 what was possibly the first academic book-length text on the Sicilian mafia (and any Italian mafia at all) from a modern sociological perspective – where for ‘modern’ we mean post-Weberian sociology (including some aspects of US functionalism). It was also the first truly empirical study on Sicilian mafia, mainly based on archival sources – something not all social scientists at the time would have considered empirical research, especially in the absence of numbers and statistics. The main argument and general approach of Hess’s book are well captured by the following quotation from the preface to the second English edition:

My theory about the mafia phenomenon is based above all on my most important source material, the Sicilian archival police records and court files which contain nothing about ‘the Mafia’, but a great deal about individual mafiosi … I have used them as criteria to assess other research material and as the basis for the portrayal of the mafioso, the structure of mafia groupings and the functions of mafia behaviour … Mafia has to be understood as a plethora of small, independent criminal organizations rather than as the secret society of common belief. This is the first point I want to make. The second point is that mafia is (or at least was) more than just crime. To treat it as crime alone misses much of its essence and fails to explain the reasons for its strength and durability. To really understand and explain it, we have to see the phenomenon as deeply rooted in the structure of Sicilian society and in its subcultural values. (1998 [1970], x–xi)

Locating the origins of mafia in the political structure of Sicilian society and, above all, in the ‘tradition of dual morality’ which lies at the core of its local, subcultural system, Hess was trying to find a way to encompass both social structure and culture in explaining the genesis of this social phenomenon and grasp its ‘essence’. Although he devoted at least one chapter to the structure of the mafioso groupings, the primary factor in its explanation was played by the regional cultural system, i.e. the subcultural code of omertà – to the point of saying that only mafiosi, with their subcultural values and individual behaviours, exist, and not ‘the mafia’ as a real organization. As Bell (1953) did in the US case, Hess saw the mainspring for mafioso behaviour as lying in people’s aspirations for social mobility within a social structure with limited opportunities but valuable (sub)cultural resources. Clearly, he was reacting to the US debate on ‘the Mafia’ as a single centralized organization. Translated into Italian in 1973 with a preface by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, Hess’s book soon became a central reference in the Italian public and academic debate on mafia. It was, conversely, relatively uninfluential in the American debate, a foreword by Cressey to its English edition notwithstanding.¹

However, Hess was only the first of a series of modern social researchers to contribute to the social science literature on Sicilian mafia starting in the 1970s. Anton Blok, a Dutch anthropologist, spent several months during the early 1960s in Genuardo, a village in western Sicily, doing participant observation and archival research. With a preface written by the then Michigan-based sociologist and historian Charles Tilly (who, at the time, was conducting his pioneering research on mobilization and state formation) and opening with a long quotation drawn from Barrington Moore, with strategic rhetorical references to Eric Wolf and Norbert Elias, Blok’s book (1974) positioned itself firmly in a tradition of studies focused on the structural dimensions of social life (see Watts 2016), though it was also very sensitive to history (a legacy of Elias, who had spent a lot of time teaching in Amsterdam where Blok had been studying for his PhD). Indeed, it was under Jeremy F. Boissevain’s supervision that Blok wrote his dissertation and subsequent book.² Blok’s position towards approaches like those adopted by Hess was very clear: ‘All such arguments in terms of values and subcultures alone are innately circular, and thus beg the very question they propose to answer’ (1974, 176n; the explicit target of this passage, however, is not Hess but Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967). Moving from Elias’s sociology of the state and his theory of social figurations, Blok proposed reading mafia as an aspect of the formation of the state in Italy. His main innovation was to understand mafia and mafiosi as elements in a wider configuration of social relations spanning different localities and an array of subjects, including officials and politicians. What mafiosi furnished, according to Blok, was mainly mediation between the administrative centre (i.e. Palermo at the regional or Rome at the national level) and the periphery:

Villages like Genuardo [the community under study] are part of larger complex societies. Many of their particular characteristics are dependent upon and a reflex of the larger society and can only be explained with reference to their specific connections with it. This is especially true of mafiosi, rural entrepreneurs of sorts, who were until recently [sic] an outstanding feature of peasant communities in Sicily’s western interior. Recruited from the ranks of peasants and shepherds, and entrusted with tasks of surveillance on the large estates (latifundia) of absentee landlords, they constituted a particular variety of middlemen – individuals who operate in different social realms and who succeed in maintaining a grip on the intrinsic tensions between these spheres. Mafiosi managed those tensions by means of physical force. Poised between landowning elite and peasants, between city and countryside, and between central government and the village, they sought to control and monopolize the links between these various groups and segments of society. (1974, xxvi–xxvii)

Like Blok, Peter and Jane Schneider spent months in Sicily in the 1960s studying demographic patterns and fertility, gender relations and land tenure – and this is the background to their book specifically devoted to the mafia as an aspect of class relations and cultural life in western Sicily, published in 1976 in a book series edited by Tilly (who had also written the preface to Blok’s book). Like Blok, the Schneiders had been doing ethnographic research on a small town in western Sicily, called Villamaura.³ Unlike Blok, though, their outlook was more sensistive to constraints rather than choices, to structure rather than agency. They moved from a concern with the ways peasant communities were encapsulated within larger systems (following their mentor, Eric Wolf) and collected ethnographic and historical data to document them until they discovered that Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, which he had just started to elaborate in 1974 with the publication of the first volume of his masterwork, was very apt for making sense of their data. In their words:

Wallerstein uses the concepts ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ to describe relationships between the various regions of Europe as they developed from the mid-fifteenth century. In particular, his analysis of Poland – which was also a wheat-exporting peripheral region – helped us to clarify our own understanding of western Sicily. Yet we did not have the benefit of his work until 1974, and were led to a similar ‘world-system’ perspective by a somewhat different route, namely as a consequence of anthropological field work conducted in western Sicily from 1965 to 1967 and again during the summers of 1968 and 1971. We did not begin our field work with that perspective. Our initial intent was to examine the structures through which peasant communities are articulated with the nation-state. Yet we soon discovered the importance of labor migration and the ways in which it connected our field site not only to the state, but to an international labor market as well. (Schneider and Schneider 1976, x)

Like Blok, the Schneiders’ target was the concept of culture – and the associated approach to cultural explanation – in terms of norms and values related to socialization, a concept they proposed to overcome by suggesting the idea of cultural codes as historically adaptive determined structures to be used as symbolic tools and resources – a move that, in many senses, anticipated the one taken more famously by American sociologist Ann Swidler (1986) in the following decade. It is worth remembering that Swidler’s work was built, in part, on the shoulders of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, a participant in the same intellectual network as Boissevain and Blok. The Schneiders’ position with respect to the status of culture and cultural analysis is well captured in this excerpt:

Scholars and others concerned with underdevelopment often link it to the presumably reactionary and traditional qualities of peasant culture. In our view, such cultural determinism is incorrect, yet it is seductive … In the course of anthropological study in a west Sicilian agricultural community we identified three cultural codes as particularly interesting and salient. The code of family honor (onore) asserts the primacy of the nuclear family in society and establishes women as symbols of familial worth. The code of friendship (amicizia) and hospitality helps solidify the omnipresent coalitions and cliques through which business affairs and other ventures are conducted. Furberia, the code of cleverness or astuteness, focuses on the individual and his immediate family, and helps legitimate the idea that almost anything goes in defense of one’s personal interests … Local as well as foreign observers frequently attribute the island’s economic difficulties to the codes in question, noting, for example, that preoccupation with family honor undermines the kind of trust that is necessary to collective organization for long-term gain, while friendship and cleverness rationalize foul play and corruption. We see these codes, however, in another light. We intend that this volume should provide a clear case for a different understanding of the role of culture in change, and that it should do this by demonstrating (1) that exogenous colonial and neo-colonial forces have had an overwhelming impact on Sicily, not only in the recent past but also over centuries, and (2) that the cultural codes at issue were instruments of adaptation to these secular forces, and not simply residua of a ‘traditional’ preindustrial past. (Schneider and Schneider 1976, 1–2; emphasis added)

A question we could raise at this point is the following: do these contributions and their authors amount to what could be termed a scientific or intellectual movement (Frickel and Gross 2005)? As a matter of fact, Hess and Blok worked independently – Blok refers to Hess, saying he became aware of his work after he had finished writing his own book (1974, 13) – and with different methods (ethnographic and archival for Hess, only archival for Blok) and from different intellectual traditions (respectively, historical-anthropological research strongly influenced by Elias’s sociology, and Weberian sociology). Blok and the Schneiders – who indeed confess in the acknowledgements of their books that they met each other several times while doing ethnography – were closer in terms of disciplinary affiliations, personal networks (with Wolf and Boissevain as common nodes) and even research sites.

The Schneiders’ Marxist approach was shared by the Italian authors – the aforementioned Arlacchi (who was a student of Giovanni Arrighi, at the time teaching in Calabria before moving to the US and joining Wallerstein at the Braudel Centre at the State University of New York at Binghamton) and Nando dalla Chiesa, whose book Il potere mafioso. Economia e ideologia (1976) was explicitly framed in Marxist-Gramscian terms and was conceived and written in the same intellectual milieu in which Arrighi had studied and trained. So, it seems that all the books published on mafia in the 1970s, except for Hess’s, shared a set of personal relations and conceptual strategies. Of course, there was enough difference in accents, topics and writing styles to make the individual books worthy of attention in their own right.

Indeed, while the research of the 1970s was conducted under the aegis of Marx, the 1980s saw the discovery of Weber’s insights by mafia studies. Arlacchi’s second book on the mafia is paramount: originally published in Italian in 1983, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was pivotal in suggesting it was time to make the turn from culture to economics – and possibly from anthropology to economics – also in the study of Italian mafias. Arlacchi’s solution was ingenious: while culture worked in making sense of traditional mafia, it did not work in accounting for the newly emergent forms of mafia, much more oriented towards profit (instead of honour) and business (instead of social control) than the earlier ones. The concept of the ‘enterpreneurial mafia’, aka mafia as business, was born – and the way towards an economic theory of the mafia began to be paved.

The first to profit from this turn-in-the-making was a Canadian-Italian political scientist, Filippo Sabetti – the author of the third historical-ethnographic study on Sicilian mafia worthy of consideration, after Blok, and Schneider and Schneider (see Figure 2.1). Sabetti’s approach in Political Authority in a Sicilian Village (1984) was highly original: indeed, his book was the first to make use of institutional theory to make sense of the mafia. The challenging perspective that Sabetti adopts – inspired by American political scientist Vincent Ostrom and future Nobel prizewinner Elinor Ostrom, as well as Italian liberal economist Francesco Ferrara – is made clear from the very first page of his book. After quoting an imaginary conversation between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan that the French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville had used as an expedient to present his thoughts after his southern travels in 1827, Sabetti continues:

Figure 2.1: Map of Sicily with the location of the three case studies (Blok 1974; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Sabetti 1984)

Note: the map also includes the location of the first ethnographic study in Sicily (Gower Chapman 1971), originally done in 1928–9.

Against the stark backdrop of governmental failures and general social disintegration, local outlaw societies or mafia groups stand out as the most successful long-term efforts at collective action in Sicily. These mafia groups have, however, been viewed, especially from outside of Sicily, as gangs of malefactors, as expression of fundamental asociality of islanders … as outlaw protective agencies of large landowners or urban capitalists, and, more generally, as impediments to human development … The study of mafia groups and how they actually work in Sicily has, in fact, become impenetrable on any premise except that of killing or murder. The multitude of problems inherent in governmental failures, general social disintegration and outlaw societies has often been characterized as the Sicilian problem or in Italian as sicilitudine. The present study is an effort to provide a more satisfactory explanation of sicilitudine within the microcosm of a single Sicilian community. (1984, 3–4)

Drawing upon a suggestion included in Alongi’s early book (1977 [1887], 45), Sabetti makes sense of mafia as an instance of self-government, a regime of self-reliance rather than a criminal institution: ‘Villagers [of Camporano, the community under investigation] attempted to obtain satisfactory remedies to local contingencies through a pattern of social organziation outside of the formal institutions. This pattern of social organization is the outlaw regime of mafia or what a sociologist policeman characterized as “primitive self-government”’ (1984, 95).

Through intensive fieldwork and, above all, the analysis of various documentary sources (including archival ones), Sabetti claims to identify in the career and doings of Mariano Ardena, the local mafia boss, an instance of a ‘profitable altruist’, i.e. ‘a villager who by helping others also helps himself’ (1984, 6). Clearly, people like Ardena were playing at the borders of legality, and it was easy for them to get involved in veritable outlaw societies along with more established and legalized ones, such as social clubs or cooperatives. A crucial insight in Sabetti’s reading of the mafia is that ‘[s]uch outlaw societies are confronted with all the problems of political organization, including the possibility that their rule-making and rule-enforcing mechanisms can become mechanisms for tyranny and shakedown rackets’ (1984, 12). This is an insightful conjecture, which I will build on in Chapter 4.

Sabetti’s contribution to mafia studies is controversial and has not exerted an appreciable impact on the field – its merits notwithstanding. His idea of ‘the mafia’ as a set of outlaw groups working to solve local problems of collective action is possibly too accommodating to mafiosi’s own self-representation as ‘men of goodwill’ to sound acceptable to readers and even scholars. But his interpretation of ‘mafia’ as an institutional arrangement capable of fulfilling political functions in certain social locations had analytical potentialities that later scholars eventually missed.⁴ In contrast, Raimondo Catanzaro’s book, published in Italian in 1988 and translated into English in 1992, is much more referenced than Sabetti’s. It has the merit of introducing a systematic historical, temporal dimension to mafia studies and a more balanced understanding of the political aspects of mafia groups with respect to economic ones. Key to a sociological understanding of the mafia is, for Catanzaro, the notion that the latter provides a ‘violent regulation of the market’ – a concept that permits the author to put together a sensitivity to political issues linked to the use of violence in social relationships and a focus on mafia’s involvement in economic activities.

Indeed, Gambetta has taken this kind of institutional analysis of mafia to the extreme. His 1993 book The Sicilian Mafia (published in Italian in 1992) acted as a watershed in mafia studies, introducing the notion of the Sicilian mafia as an instance of a more general type of economic organization, the ‘industry of private protection’. We will focus on this book in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that Gambetta proposed an economic theory of the mafia conceived as an ‘industry’ specialized in the provision of a special commodity, private protection, capitalizing on Franchetti’s early suggestion of mafia as an industry on its own (even though with a different objective) and, above all, on Thomas Schelling’s and Peter Reuter’s pioneering contributions to an economic analysis of organized crime. What Gambetta added to this mix was a massive documentation drawn from recent Italian trials against Cosa Nostra (the maxi processo organized by Judge Giovanni Falcone and the Palermo antimafia pool on the basis of Tommaso Buscetta’s testimony in 1984–7) and a rich sociological imagination, able to ‘translate’ economic insights into sophisticated understandings of mafia as both an economic organization and cultural reality – with the former accounting for the latter. Academic writings on mafias after 1992 may be divided according to their position with respect to this book and Gambetta’s more general approach to mafia (for followers, see, e.g., Varese 2001, 2010; for critics, see, e.g., Paoli 2003; Santoro 2007).

Attempting to review all the relevant production on Italian mafias since these pioneering empirical studies would require much more space than I have here. Instead of a review of texts and their authors (the most influential of which I will refer to in the following chapters, partly as sources and partly as targets of my critical readings), I will here propose a simple classification of approaches, each with some examples.

First, we can distinguish between perspectives that are economic in orientation (e.g., insisting on both material and rational dimensions of human conduct and life), and perspectives that put greater emphasis on nonmaterial and nonrational aspects – be they symbols or status positions or identities – or even power management and regulation. The first group includes approaches as different as rational action theory (RAT) and political economy, i.e. individualistic and holistic approaches. But the most important distinction relates to the identification of the mafia phenomenon: is the mafia something pertaining to economic life or to some other sphere/life order, such as politics or social solidarity (e.g., communal life)? Putting it bluntly, is the mafia an economic phenomenon or a political one? Is it business or government? To be sure, mafia seems to be precisely ‘the’ institutional order that makes such conceptual distinctions problematic: the distinction between spheres of life which comprises so many parts of modern society’s identity and structure looks less clear when seen through the prism of mafia and mafia-like phenomena.

I would say that what makes the mafia sociologically interesting is its resistance to being easily captured by the established categories of the social sciences – categories generated by the meeting of a certain gaze with a certain historical, and geographical, experience. This is more than the usual ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie 1956) syndrome that social scientists are well aware of. The problem is not that the concept of the mafia is a contested one, but that almost every sociological concept applied to it shows some weakness or inadequacy to capture its working. Letizia Paoli’s (2003) reference to the notion of ‘multifunctional brotherhoods’ tries to capture this lack of differentiation, of course. However, since scholars are eager to make sense of the mafia by translating its puzzling phenomenology into our common categories (which include the distinction between economics and politics, as well as between public and private), it is still possible and plausible to use these institutional distinctions as tools for distinguishing between theories of the mafia. Gambetta’s economic theory of the mafia as ‘an industry of private protection’ is the most explicit among current theories on this aspect. But it is relatively easy to classify other theories according to the same conceptual structure as well. So, it is apparent that Sabetti sees the mafia as belonging to the realm of government and politics more than to economics, and the same is true for scholars as different as Santino and Hess – the latter with his more recent (2011) identification of mafias as para-state organizations.

Things are more complex, however, because authors can change their dominant perspective over time: this is the case of the Schneiders, for example, who moved from a neo-Marxist political economy approach to an interpretation of mafia that is much more sensitive to both ‘culture and politics’ (e.g., Schneider and Schneider 2003; see also Tarrow 2006). Something similar could be said for Federico Varese, who moved towards the acceptance of a more blurred distinction between mafia as business and mafia as government (compare his 2001 and 2011 works). However, I suppose that the conceptual map offered in Figure 2.2 still roughly works.

Figure 2.2: Mafia studies, after 1970: a conceptual map (I)

*Includes political economy

Note: position in the cells is representative also of distance from other perspectives (e.g., Varese is less distant than Gambetta from an identification of the mafia as a ‘non-economic entity’, which means that Varese takes more distance from the notion of the mafia as a business or an industry than Gambetta)

This conceptual map would be incomplete, however, if not supplemented by a second one, built on the now traditional distinction between action, structure (e.g., social structure), and culture (e.g., cultural structure). Figure 2.3 shows how current authors and theories can be mapped onto this set of distinctions, whose analytical space partly overlaps with the perspective/identity map. For the ‘action’ side, the main difference is between scholars who adopt a rational choice perspective and scholars who follow a less constraining theory of action.

Figure 2.3: Mafia studies, after 1970: a conceptual map (II)

Rational choice theory in the study of organized crime was pioneered by Reuter in the early 1980s, and then applied to the study of the mafia by Sabetti (1984). Gambetta (1993) made it a cornerstone of his economic theory of the mafia as ‘an industry of private protection’ (for an application of RAT to an important historical case that exhibits some resemblance to the mafia – an application apparently independent from Gambetta’s and with somewhat different results – see Leeson 2009). The idea of ‘social structure’ is not a uniform one: for some (e.g., Gambetta), it roughly means the structure of property rights; for others (e.g., Blok), it is the structure of social relations; for others again, it is mainly the class structure (e.g., Santino). ‘Culture’ is conceived of in terms of norms and values by Hess, who wrote in the 1960s, but not by Paoli (2003) or Santoro (2007) – both of whom make use of a ‘revised’ concept of culture in terms of symbols and cognitive schemas. This is the same concept of culture we can find in the economic theory of the mafia, even though it is almost never named as such (the term ‘culture’ is reserved by Gambetta for norms and values; skills and cognition are not called culture in the economic theory of the mafia, even though they are ‘culture’ in the most recent cultural theory which capitalizes on Bourdieu, Geertz, Douglas and so on: see, e.g., Smith 2001). In the economic theory of mafia, mafia culture has a regulative status, whereas in Paoli (2003), and even more so in Santoro (2007), it plays a constitutive role (on this distinction between regulative and constitutive, see DiMaggio 1994).

Last but not least, it is useful to try to locate and make sense of sociological (or anthropological, or political science) works on the mafia according to sociological types or genres (extending the classifications used for sociology to other disciplines). I have in mind here, in particular, the fourfold distinction between professional sociology, policy sociology, critical sociology and public sociology (Burawoy 2005). Let me say that these distinctions are frequently collapsed or blurred in the literature on the mafia, mainly because of the strong presence of a critical and public attitude even among followers of ‘professional’ sociology (this is why I have decided not to include a diagram for this classification). In a sense, we could say that a critical stance is implicit in every piece of sociological work on the mafia. This criticism is usually addressed towards the mafia itself, and secondarily towards the social structure and/or the political system making the mafia possible. Moreover, it is a common ambition of mafia scholars to write for, and to be read by, an audience that is larger than their peers or students: this makes room for frequent incursions into the territories of public sociology, with their typical features (readability, communication strategies useful for reaching large audiences, etc.). This is what makes a book like Gomorrah (Saviano 2006, 2007) less an instance of public sociology of mafia (but recall that Saviano, even though he is a professional writer, has an educational background as a philosopher and anthropologist) than a successful performance in creative writing grounded on readings of public documents and backed by direct (and sometimes participant) observation. The ambition of offering policy advice or suggestions is very common among scholars on mafia as organized crime – who often act or have acted (or hope to act) as advisers to governments or other public organizations (including NGOs), and are often asked to provide advice and recommendations for them.

An important point: it is often difficult to locate a given text in one or another class (or genre) because of the gap between explicit or manifest aims, and/or self-representation, and hidden or latent ones. It is not rare that texts or approaches presenting themselves as pure exercises of social analysis conceal (and commonly presume) a political or at least a normative stance towards a certain state of the world. It is not rare that this stance is communicated through the adoption of a linguistic register that sometimes exemplifies what has been termed – not without a normative bias – as ‘expressive sociology’ (Boudon 2002). As I will argue in the next chapter, this seems to be the case with the economic theory of the mafia, which presents itself as the most analytical and detached, if not scientific, representation of the mafia and mafia-like things, but it is grounded on a strong commitment to a well-defined political philosophical tradition, the liberal one running from John Locke to John Rawls, passing through Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville (see Santoro 2007). With Weber, we would say that this ‘relation to values’ is a necessary prerequisite and ingredient of any social study. With the same Weber, however, we could ask whether scholars working on mafia make every effort to put aside those same values or keep them under control when doing empirical research, theorizing about their data, and writing their texts on mafia.

In conclusion, we could say that the last four decades of mafia studies, at least in Italy, have been marked by a series of features that we can synthetize as the ‘G effects’ (dalla Chiesa 2010b; Santoro 2010). The first is the Generation effect. The second is the Justice effect (giustizia in Italian). The third is the Google effect. To these three we should add at least three others: a Gender effect, a Gambetta effect and, finally, a Gomorrah effect. In short, we are thinking of the following aspects:

1 New generations of researchers often move ahead forgetting the contributions of the previous generations of scholars. This is apparent in the almost total lack of references to classics of mafia studies as well as to scholars who have not entered the pantheon of contemporary authorities in these studies – e.g., Hess, Blok, the Schneiders, Arlacchi.

2 With the testimony of Buscetta, the maxi-trial, the assassinations of judges Falcone and Borsellino, and the rise of an antimafia movement, the justice system and its products have become the major source of reference, of information and even of symbolic legitimation in research on mafia. Today there is a large industry of articles and books almost exclusively built on court testimony and documents. The risk is to take as neutral what is inevitably the application of a point of view on mafia, losing sight of the technical legal constraints to which judges are subject and therefore of what cannot be captured by the judicial apparatus.

3 Google has become a relevant source even in mafia studies because of its readiness and its apparent completeness. But Google and the internet in general are not so transparent or so reliable as people often think as sources of data about a complex topic like mafia.

4 Gender considerations entered mafia studies only in the 1990s, with the first studies devoted to the role of women in mafia organizations and the increase of female mafia students sensitive to issues of gender identity and inequalities. Mafia is indeed a big topic for gender analysis, with its patriarchical organization, its references to honour and its gender-based and biased division of labour.

5 We already have introduced the Gambetta effect, and in the next chapter we will focus on this.

6 As everyone knows, Gomorrah has been one of the major bestselling publications in the world in recent decades. Saviano’s background as a graduate in philosophy with some anthropological education influenced the way the social sciences entered his writing as symbolic and intellectual resources in this sort of fictionalized ethnography of camorra life in some areas of Naples and its surrounding area (though the book’s final chapter is focused on a case of ‘mafia export’ to Scotland). Surely, the impact of Gomorrah on social research has been more indirect than direct – as a reference point for debating issues such as the comparative merits of academic writing and literature, or the impact of a certain kind of writing on public debate, or even the realibility of the sources used by Saviano in writing his book.This impact might be measured by the number of articles devoted to the book in sociological, historical and criminological journals, at least in Italy. However, its impact can follow much more subtle routes, as the vehicle for a certain vision of what the mafia is (and for Saviano the mafia is first and foremost a mark of incivility and something to be denounced and combatted, and in light of these objectives it has to be described, understood and denounced). The success of a bestseller is not only in the number of copies sold or its position in bestseller lists, but also in its capacity to shape the public debate according to its own terms and in its even wider circulation through other means, such as films and TV series (and both have been made from Gomorrah the book).