Abstract
The article presents a critique of a dominant way of analysing gang conflict in Norwegian sociology. The research in question uses a rather crude Marxist analysis that could somehow fit any gang conflict in the country. However, this kind of analysis was gradually put in question first by professor Ottar Brox and his criticism of the moral hegemony by a group of Marxists gathered around the publication “Klassekampen” (“Class Struggle”). Then the analysis was challenged by gang-researchers who reached back to the classical study of Frederic M. Thrasher, finding the latter more fruitful for analysis. Antonio Gramsci (1891- 1937) who coined the term cultural hegemony used it to describe how a social class can manipulate the system of values in a society to establish a ruling class world-view. In my context the term moral hegemony is used to show how an intellectual group came to dominate the discourse on relations between Norwegians and immigrants, labelling other views as “racist”.
Highlights
Thrasher (1927) pointed to that gangs in Chicago were primarily a phenomenon of the children of foreign-born immigrants
Thrasher maintains that gangs grow out of needs the boys have and which are not met by society
In this article I have reviewed the Norwegian research on gangs from around 1990 up to the present
Summary
Received August 26th, 2013; revised September 26th, 2013; accepted October 3rd, 2013. The phenomena were initially to a large extent interpreted within a framework of racism and anti-racism, which is a dominant discourse in Norwegian society This discourse was inspired by Marxist sociology, seeing immigrants as suppressed by society, and the fighting of gangs as a result of this suppression. The study describes how the boys in the two gangs who ended up in a fight that killed one on the gang members, used to be friends, even feel like brothers, because they came from the same country. They used to share most things, they always stuck together, protected and helped each other. She has for several years been working with immigration problems, and has participated actively in the public debate and anti-racist work (my underlining, my translation)”
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