Professor Dick Hobbs joins Laurie Taylor to discuss his work on 'Lush Life', a rich, ethnographic study into 'Dogtown', a composite of several overlapping neighbourhoods in East London.

Looking behind the clichéd notions of criminal firms and underworlds, he finds that activity which was once the preserve of professional criminals has now been normalised.

He invites us to consider whether or not the very idea of organised crime has become outdated in a predatory, post industrial world in which many fight, by illegal as well as legal means, to survive on the margins.

Also, the presence and activities of the Mafia in the UK with Dr Felia Allum, a Lecturer in Italian history and politics, discussing how Italian organised crime functions outside its territory of origin.

Below, read an article from the OU's Geoff Andrews on a writer whose books depict the Italian mafia as well as more related content and free learning.

Thinking Allowed is on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesdays at 4.00pm and repeated on Monday mornings at 12.15am. Full transmission details, and listen again links, can be found on bbc.co.uk

Academic insights and content

An Italian dissident Creative commons imageCredit: static461 under CC-BY-NC licence [Warning: Image page contains swearing]

We look at why Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah - an expose of the mafia in Napoli - is so ground-breaking   Read more : An Italian dissident

OU on the BBC: Our Crime Copyrighted imageCredit: BBC

We unpack and re-tell human stories behind the criminal act through the sometimes shocking images of youth crime caught on camera.  Read more : OU on the BBC: Our Crime

Perceptions of crime Copyrighted imageCredit: BBC

As visual media have proliferated in the past thirty years, so have, it seems, our perceptions of crime  Read more : Perceptions of crime

The meaning of crime Creative commons imageCredit: By Kashfi Halford via Flickr under Creative Commons license

The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 has addressed the issue of how society interprets the crime problem. But what is crime? This unit examines how...  Read more : The meaning of crime