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Resumo

What happens when a criminal organization operating through hierarchical relations establishes a cooperative institution committed to equal participation? This article explores the organizational intersection of a Mafia cooperative, drawing from a trial case involving several Sicilian mafiosi sharing a social life (convivenza) with laypeople in an agrarian winemaking cooperative. This intersection begs exploration of the Mafia's striving for social consent, which is a relatively understudied feature of organized crime. The Mafia's use of egalitarian practices and lawful organization reveals a process of converting cooperative egalitarianism into a hierarchy. This article explores the Mafia cooperative as a paradoxical institution, and it examines the empirical collapse of conceptual dichotomies of coercion–consent and hierarchical–egalitarian systems of social organization. By investigating a Mafia cooperative and its associated convivenza, the article moves beyond such apparent dichotomies to analyze complex outcomes of this social life and to propose a Gramscian attention to consent rather than the traditional focus on violence in Mafia studies.

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