Discussion Board 3

Sociological Forum, 2017

Welcome to New York City! Crowded sidewalks, crowded attractions, crowded traffic lights. Crowded apartments, crowded court systems, crowded stock markets. In the Big Apple, you will always be around others. This means opportunities for social interaction are in superabundance. But beware! In "the city that never sleeps," the fraudster is never far. And s/he sees opportunities for social interaction as opportunities for personal profit. New York City's schemers have their eye out for a chance to get one over on you.. .. In The Con Men: Hustling in New York City, Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton offer a fantastic "collage ethnography" (19). For them, this means the structure of their text intertwines casual observations of the cityscape and self-reported reconstructions of events from study participants with data gathered from formal interviewing. But also, it is a "collage ethnography" because it brings together an assortment of New York City cons and hustles, which range from street cheats to corporate charlatans to corrupt police. As a whole, the text covers an array of occupations that require what might be called "illicit entrepreneurialism." Williams and Milton present the schemes in succession, making The Con Men read like a cynical welcome manual for the na€ ıve tourist or uninitiated gentrifier-with no detriment to the text's scholarly rigor. Thus, Williams and Milton seem more like exhibitors than they do academic authors. I mean this to commend them in two ways. First, The Con Men is the first in Columbia University Press's exciting new series, Studies in Transgression. This series aims to "offer an alternative to the mainstream" and "explore challenging research topics in an interdisciplinary way" (cover page). That the structure and writing style is difficult to place within disciplinary boundaries-and at times academic boundaries-speaks to the authors' success in producing an unorthodox text. That being said, although Williams and Milton succeed in their intention to "minimize but not entirely dismiss academic considerations," they also skillfully pepper their text with insightful analytical and theoretical considerations throughout. Second, Williams and Milton can be thought of as exhibitors in this work because they view schemery in the city as art. They write, "the con artist is just as much an artist as any other kind" (45). In the exhibitor's spirit of displaying works of art to an interested audience, the 11 chapters between the introduction and epilogue serve as an exhibition of various "artistic creations" (45) by illicit entrepreneurs.

Ethos, 1984

ETHOS expense of blurring together at least two character-types that are actually quite distinct. On the one hand, the term trickster is often used to describe what Klapp (1954) called the "clever hero." The clever hero is a character who consistently outwits stronger opponents, where "stronger" can refer to physical strength or power or both. In Klapp's analysis, characters like Davy Crockett, Robin Hood, Ulysses-even Will Rogers-are all considered to be clever heroes. It is presumably this "clever hero" sense of the term that allows the trickster label to be applied to Afro-American folk heroes like Brer Rabbit (Edwards 1978), to the Chinese folk hero Wen-chang (Levy 1974), to the Thai folk hero Sug (Brun 1976) and even to Black pimps in contemporary Los Angeles (Milner 1972). On the other hand, the term trickster was first introduced in connection with the study of North American Indian mythology, and the North American trickster is not at all a clever hero. On the con

The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 2013

Deception is often associated with economic gain and white-collar crime. But studying deception highlights the need for criminologists and practitioners to move beyond legal definitions and conviction rates when attempting to achieve depth in understanding criminality, its motivations and possible specialisms. Further, to explore the complexity of deception requires recognition of the range of skills inherent in this modus operandi, which is better recognised as a potentially-criminal tool found in much criminal behaviour. Theories that attempt to explain specialisation need to move on from a focus on crimes committed and give appropriate attention to skills employed.

Fake it 'till you make it is a much advertised nostrum. Well, anyone who is not pathologically naive and who has encountered the corporate-speak of today's urban living knows that the fake-it meme is already in the DNA of most institutional critters, large and small. The only news is that this virus might also be deployed by bus drivers and check-out girls. With this in mind, the essay takes the fake-it topic beyond some simple self-trickery sold as positive thinking, and looks at various extended mutations inside and outside of the law.

Despite the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema share the same birthday, as 1895 saw the publication of Sigmund Freud's Studies in Hysteria and the first public presentation of the moving image by the Lumière brothers, and the huge influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on (fiction) film theory, little, if anything, has been written about the relationship between the documentary film-maker and the subject of his or her film in terms of unpacking that relationship in psychoanalytical terms. This article employs some psychoanalytical ideas in order to investigate that relationship, focusing in particular on transference. The article also includes a case study of the author's relationship with the subject of her film The Conman with 14 Wives, broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 5 in 2006.

Personality and Individual Differences

The present study (N = 462) examined the relationship between the Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and deception in domain-general and domain-specific contexts. As predicted, psychopathy and Machiavellianism were linked to the propensity to lie in different contexts, including mating and academic dishonesty. Psychopathy was related to experiencing more positive emotions associated with lying and Machiavellianism was associated with increased amount of cognitive effort associated with deception. Sex differences in deception were partially mediated by individual differences in the Dark Triad traits. Our findings have important implications for the interpersonal strategies employed by those high on the Dark Triad.

2002

Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio Trickster is semiosis; she is the archetype, the patterned schema of signs that seeks order from chaos only to disrupt that order revealing the boundaries of our cultural concepts and contexts. As Spinks (1991) reminds us, "Wherever the culture has drawn a line of demarcation, Trickster is there to probe the line and test the limits" (p. 2). She is a challenger of boundaries created by us and for us within the whole process of semiosis. For Trickster participates in all aspects of semiosis. Whether we become complacent in our notions of teaching and learning or challenge our present assumptions, Trickster plays into each decision we make, each action we initiate, each sign that we attend to or ignore. She is no stranger to the current school reform movement in special education as she shapes, reshapes, erases and marks the boundaries between

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012

Victims of crimes (and fraud especially) are not just passive observers of crime. This phenomenon, called victim facilitation, implies that there are specific personality traits that predict becoming a victim, and hence, in the present context, scam compliance. We used the five-factor model of personality, a brief self-control scale and the UPPS impulsive behaviour scale to measure the impact of personality traits on scam compliance. Participants answered the personality scales and questions measuring scam compliance across nine scenarios describing typical frauds. The scales were validated and tested for reliability. The UPPS impulsive behaviour scale was re-factorized and revalidated. A sample of respondents balanced for scam compliance between subjects was used to measure scam compliance. Results showed that extraversion, openness, selfcontrol, premeditation, sensation seeking and (negative) urgency correlated with scam compliance.