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Based on a recent ethnographic study of professional crime (Hobbs 1995), this paper is concerned with juxtaposing the contemporary enacted environment of serious crime with the most potent device that is utilised to explain and contain its practices and ideological frameworks: the underworld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the process through which an elite of professional communicators regularly produce knowledge cast in the form of news. It focuses on the ideological and relational constraints which shape the knowledge product in systematic ways, and it is hoped that the type of analysis offered here can enrich our understanding of how economic, political, and social interests come to be reflected in media representations and accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kidnapping is a crime that has not received due attention in sociological literature. Policy and risk assessment milieux discursively construct it as a 'threat to society', and administrative studies have focused on classifications that describe the phenomenon. The most widespread typology of kidnapping incidents takes as a starting point criminal motivation, producing a bipolar analysis of the crime as economic or political. This article re-examines classificatory and discursive approaches, placing emphasis on the social logic of kidnapping. It is argued that kidnapping presents all the characteristics of a rationalized system of exchange, based on rules and regulations reminiscent of legitimate business. The way that these regulations are described by state authorities or private agents alike allows us an in-depth analysis of the crime itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]