Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State. By Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2009, i-vi + 193pp. 65.00 hb)

Abstract

Street Capital by Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen is a book to gladden the heart of any sociologist or criminologist who, sated with the increasing number of books on theories about theories, nowadays longs for a good ethnography—one, for instance, in the tradition of, say, W. F. Whyte. For that is what Street Capital is. As Nils Christie points out on the back cover: This is a book in the great tradition of studies of street-corner societies. But the arena is exceptional: a riverside in the capital of a Scandinavian welfare state. It is an analysis sharpened by new tools that make for new insights. The setting is Oslo's riverside—the area called Inner Oslo East—and Sandberg and Pedersen base their book on 20 in-depth interviews with some of the 50 or so young, black cannabis dealers whom they also spoke to (but more briefly) and who were also hanging out at the open drugs market (‘The River’) during the year when the authors were conducting their fieldwork. (Only one woman was selling drugs at The River and she was amongst those interviewed in depth.)