Alternative Business Outlaws, Crime and Culture [Paperback]

From Robin Hood to Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, outlaws have been a central part of 800 years of culture. These are characters who criticise the power of those in the castle or the skyscraper, and earn their keep by breaking the law. Outlaws break categories too. They are fact and fiction, opposition and product, culture and economy, natural justice and organized crime.

Beginning with Robin Hood stealing from the rich, and covering along the way pirates, smugglers, highwaymen, the Wild West, the Mafia and many others, Martin Parker offers a fresh and exciting insight into the counter culture of the outlaw  one that rebels against the more dominant and traditional forms of economy and organization and celebrates a life free from wage slavery.

Alternative Businessis a highly readable, entertaining book that will prove a helpful study tool for all students and lecturers working on organizations, cultural studies and criminology.

1. Knowing the Outlaw  2. The Many Myths of Robin Hood  3. Pirate Utopianism  4. Robbers and Romantics  5. Outlaws and the Frontier  6. The Mafia  7. Modern Bandits  8. The Counter Culture and Organization  9. Popular Political Economy

'Nicely crafted, a rollicking good read, and a worthy successor and extension of Hobsbawm's work on Bandits, this timely book, published in England in the wake of a carnivalesque occasion of crime and culture that is widely debated, will make a significant contribution to both studies of business and organizations as well as of culture more generally. As an interpreter against the legislators of normalcy Martin Parker makes a highly effective argument for the reconsideration of what it might mean to propose that to 'to live outside the law you must be honest'.'

Stewart Clegg,lÃ.