Diego Gambetta

Diego Gambetta
Born	Turin, Italy
Occupation	Professor of social theory at the European University Institute and Official Fellow at the Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Known for	Analytical contributions to the study of trust, and pathbreaking research on The Sicilian Mafia

Diego Gambetta (b. Turin, 1952) is an Italian born social scientist. He is a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence and an official fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is well known for his vivid and unconventional applications of economic theory and a rational choice approach to understanding a variety of social phenomena. He has made important analytical contributions to the concept of trust by using game theory and signalling theory.

In 1983 Gambetta received his PhD in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral supervisor was the late social statistician Cathie Marsh. He was first junior and then senior research fellow at King's College, Cambridge, from 1984 to 1991. From 1995 until 2003 he was reader in sociology at the University of Oxford and fellow of All Souls College. In 2003 he became professor of sociology and official fellow of Nuffield College. In 2000 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. He is also a Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology. He has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Sciences Po and Collége de France in Paris, and Stanford University.

In his book "The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection" (published by Harvard University Press in 1993), he brings a new perspective on an extralegal institution like the Mafia by underscoring the market demand for protection that it satisfies and by showing how mafiosi’s apparently outlandish rituals and behaviours make organisational sense. His approach has had much influence on the study of mafia-like organisations around the world – it has been applied to cases in Russia, Hong Kong, Japan Bulgaria and Mainland China – and more generally on the study of extra-legal governance as well as Mafia Transplantation.

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