Crime & Deviance Weber Mafia

Structure, agency and organizations are the basis of society. All organizations involve relationships between individuals, including different theories that purport to be explanations for how those relationships work. This is true whether the organization be government, prison, school or the Girl Scouts. The Sicilian Mafia also represents an organization with a certain structure, agency and interaction among members. Two sociology theories of particular usefulness when it comes to exploring the relationships of politics, family and authority that exist within the Mafia are Weberian and Symbolic Interactionism. The Sicilian Mafia is a clandestine organization involving thousands of members divided into different families of Italian ancestry. The key to the Mafia's overwhelmingly successful enterprises is its profound structure tightly bonded "family" relationship among members, "Held together by bonds rooted in kinship and cemented by ritual, the Mafia is imagined to be a cohesive force, ruling over the domain of organized crime and overwhelming any who resist its hegemony, whether competitor or victim" (Bryan's, 1999, 1).

In Sicily, the Mafia is a tightly-knit organization with little trust of outsiders much like many corporations do not trust outside competitors or government agencies (think tobacco companies, Microsoft, etc.). The politics (structure and agency) of the Mafia is particularly well-suited to both a Weberi

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universe and society. Symbols can be insignia rings or words. The people interact through a series of symbols like signs, gestures or language. The Mafia's structure and agency is definitely built around symbolic interaction. For example, the Mafia often uses a fabricated language to represent or symbolize something else. For example, instead of a bookkeeper listing $40,000 cash in his record book he might list 40 Oranges with family members knowing one orange equals $1,000. Social interaction in the Mafia, then, becomes meaningful because its members are able to interpret the behavior of other members through a shared understanding of these symbols. Further, outsiders cannot interact because of this closed-off-to-outsiders symbolic interaction. However, even in total organizations control is not total. While the boundaries are formally established for members of the Mafia there are also informal boundaries erected through the process of negotiated order. This concept is where Symbolic Interactionism takes into account a broader and more realistic reality than the "ideals" theories of Weber. For regardless of the agreed upon symbols and interpretation of them, various members of the Mafia will often move outside of the

Category: Government - C