The Social Organization of Street Gang Activity in an Urban Ghetto

Abstract

This essay draws on long‐term ethnographic data to analyze the shifting relations between street gangs and their broader community. The essay focuses on one particular moment in the evolution of a ghetto‐based street gang, namely its attempt to “corporatize” by accumulating revenues in underground economies, in order to demonstrate that neither the structure nor the practices of the street gang can be understood apart from the social organizational context of the larger community it inhabits.