1) Bibliographic data
Rawlinson, Paddy (2002) “Capitalists, Criminals and Oligarchs--Sutherland and the New "Robber Barons",” Crime, Law and Social Change, V. 37-3, Apr.:293-307.

2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
Discuss the influence and impact of corporate business on transition economies in Eastern Europe as measure against that of organized crime. If the crime label is removed and substituted by behavior and social impact as indicators of “good” and “bad” economic practice, it is feasible to argue that legal business can be as damaging, if not more, to civil society as conventional organized crime.
The violations of law by corporations are deliberate and organized crime. This does not mean that corporations never violate the law inadvertently and in an unorganized manner. It does mean that a substantial portion of their violations are deliberate and organized. The market now intervenes in every aspect of life; its language and dogma drive policy in areas whose autonomy is fundamental to the existence of civil society.
The end of the Cold War and the opening up of borders in the former Soviet empire spawned a new area of international concern, that of global/ organized/ transnational/ cross border/ crime. The variety of terms betrays a lack of consensus (and, arguably, understanding) as to the nature of this new menace while the response to it displays an interesting homogeneity. Organized Crime has replaced Soviet communism as the new enemy of democracy and the free market.
As Dick Hobbes has pointed out: “Organized crime is not experienced globally or transnationally, for these are abstracts fields devoid of relations. We experience crime as a local phenomenon…” The more familiar activities of organized crime include drug-smuggling, money-laundering, a variety of forms of contraband, human smuggling, pornography, arms smuggling and, more recently, the illegal procurement of and sale of body parts.
Organized crime is primarily parasitic and even when it becomes symbiotic with legitimate structures it continues to work with stable official entities, albeit with decreasing dependency, even in the so-called criminal state of Russia. Organized crime can be “the antithesis of all we regard as civil” but it plays a relatively small part in eroding those ideals Western states claim as fundamental to democracies and a free and fair market.
Sutherland’s study refutes any notion of some kind of ethical evolution in business and corporate behavior. Violations of the law amongst corporations are so common as to be the norm, hence the bemused reaction by one businessman as to why he was being prosecuted for an act committed by all his peers. Like the underworld, business sees no problem with law breaking in so far as it does not impede on its own specific codes of behavior.
As John McMurty writes: Global market competition has at this stage of social evolution become humanity’s primary pathological competition. The capitalist ethos broadens the possibilities not just for organized crime but, in a increasingly ruthless market, encourages legal business to adopt expedient and dubious alliances and contentious behaviors in the preservation of its status and the maintenance of peace. Legal and illegal entrepreneurship increasingly comprises ad hoc responses to deferring relationships, opportunities and pressures within an unstable shifting framework of legality. Organized crime flourishes because it is constantly able to feed from the growing pile of human and social debris left by global capitalism.

3) Conceptual references to transnational-transnationalism
Transnational, transnationality

4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
Law can no longer be a starting point of definition in the multi-jurisdictional environment across which global capitalism operates. As share holding has become the provenance of board range of economic populations, victim and perpetrator of corporate criminality converge as the individual stockholder.