Text Box: traders at this margin are particularly vulnerable to having their licenses revoked and being sanctioned. Thus the threat of this may act as a more subtle form of control than prosecution or even cautioning. Further toward the pole of non-enforcement and regulation traders escape sanctions entirely. The idea of ‘accommodation and collusion’ reflects the fact that regulatory agencies possess inadequate resources to pursue policies of full enforcement and/or it is acknowledged that the object of regulation is not amenable to enforcement. Regulatory capture refers to a process in which the traders have subverted the regulators to ensure non-enforcement. In extreme cases of ownership/control the regulators will actually share in the profitability of the market. An exemplary instance of this being the involvement in nightclub security staff in dealing illicit drugs for consumption on their premises in many English cities. In between these positions there are other possibilities: markets may be licensed to operate under certain circumstances, or regulators may collude in specific or occasional breaches of law or regulation. Again, the point needs to be made that these possibilities arise in all markets whether legal or not. What determines the specific outcome at any one time in particular market will be an array of factors relating to the political, economic and moral narration of the threat they pose. Public versus private responsibilities for security: The shift in understanding organised crime from enforcement to alternative forms of prevention and to regulation has been accompanied by re-framing policing and control. Considered as a process rather than an institution, policing encompasses the activities and security capacities of statutory authorities other than the police, such as local authorities, schools, health authorities, housing providers etc., private businesses and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), pressure-groups, tenants and residents associations, special interest groups etc. In turn this re-framing of policing has provoked a broader debate about the appropriate division of responsibilities for security between ‘public’ authorities and ‘private’ citizens and organisations (Garland, 1997). Skeptics of this emerging new division of security labour, certainly in western societies, have regarded it as a strategy used by public authorities to shed responsibility for security and further ‘rationalise’ public expenditure. Advocates note the historical importance of informal modes of social control, the power of peer pressures and community sanctions, and the consequent need to escape a debilitating faith in the expertise of the ‘professional’ public bureaucracy. Whilst this debate has been conducted largely in terms of the response to ‘street’ crimes and ‘incivilities’, there are clearly important implications in the field of organised crime for the division of responsibilities between police and other public authorities that will always be subject to the constraints of scarce public resources and private organisations and citizens with unequal access to actual and potential security resources. ‘Go-it-alone’ government versus multi-agency governance: This question of responsibility for security relates to a broader debate, again within western societies, on the declining capacity of states to command, so that notions of ‘sovereign government’ are increasingly replaced by ideas of ‘governance’, which is more Text Box: of a process of co-ordination, steering, influencing and balancing the interactions of public and private groups (Kooiman, 1993). In turn, this shift has been explained in terms of the ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ problems facing state authorities. The first arises because social and economic sub-systems are so impenetrable to outsiders that state authorities cannot learn how they work or, if the state is able to control or regulate these sub-systems, the information required by the state is as diverse and complex as that possessed by the ‘regulated’ and their roles become blurred. Even if this knowledge problem can be resolved, however, the problem of power remains: state authorities rarely possess adequate powers and instruments of policy with which to intervene in the processes of the sub-systems (Mayntz, 1993). This problem is compounded by the fact that, if these knowledge and power issues apply to legal social and economic activities, then they clearly apply in much greater force when the state seeks to control illegal social activities. State officials are, of course, hampered in their ability to acknowledge these problems for fear of being seen to forfeit the ‘right to govern’. It is in this sense that much of the official discourse on TOC in particular, and crime control in general, is infused with the ‘punitive populist’ discourse of ‘wars on drugs’, the ‘fight against crime’ and the need to be ‘tough’. What this means is that the gulf between the symbolic terms in which policies are discussed and their real impact is probably greater in the area of crime than in any other area of governmental responsibility (Sheptycki, 1998). The increasing recognition of these problems has lead to some tentative experiments with the idea of ‘joined-up government’ (JUG) in which complex social-political problems, like TOC, are understood as multi-faceted and in need of multi-agency responses. In place of the increasingly specialised division of labour within modern governments that produces highly insular departments, the idea of JUG emphasises the importance of governing the diverse determinations that generate complex problems such as crime. So, for example, it is seen as important to recognise, interpret and govern the strategic relations between crime and education, crime and housing, crime and health provision, crime and employment opportunities etc. In other words, crime, transnational, organised, or otherwise, is regarded as an emergent product of a complex web of interdependent social relations. It is these relations that need to be researched and governed, rather than some notion of crime – whether transnational and organised or otherwise – that is abstracted from this real social context. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the highly emotive politics of transnational organised crime. Efficiency versus accountability: A ubiquitous tension in the policy response to crime and criminality is that of the need to get something done and the need to continually examine the political and ethical implications of crime control. Policy makers and public administrations under pressure to respond to perceived problems of crime are, often, impatient with such critical reflection’. Yet if the potentially counterproductive effects of policy responses discussed above are to be avoided there is a need for greater reflexivity in questioning the very terms of policy debate. Subjecting the very terms of debate about TOC to critical scrutiny is not a pedantic obstacle to interventions against