Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Social and Legal Studies, 26 (4), 2017, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Social and Legal Studies page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/sls on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Regulation
T2 - Managing the Antinomies of Economic Vice and Virtue
AU - Picciotto, Salomone
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Social and Legal Studies, 26 (4), 2017, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Social and Legal Studies page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/sls on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
PY - 2017/12/1
Y1 - 2017/12/1
N2 - In the quarter-century that SLS has been published, regulation has emerged as a new, and for many exciting, inter-disciplinary field. The concept itself requires a wider view of normativity than the narrow positivist one of law as command. It is certainly protean, ranging over many fundamental questions about the changing nature of the public sphere of politics and the state, and its interactions with the ‘private’ sphere of economic activity and social relations, as well as the mediation of these interactions, especially through law. This survey aims to outline and evaluate some of the main contours of the field as it has developed in this recent period, focusing on the regulation of economic activity. Regulation is seen as having emerged with the withdrawal by governments from direct provision of many economic and social services, to be replaced by corporatist bureaucracies and quasi-public agencies managing the complex public-private interactions of financialised capitalism. The arguments for ‘smart’ regulation have, in an era fixated on neo-liberalism, generally legitimised delegation of responsibility to big business. Its advocates, having been drawn into policy fields, have perhaps too often lost their critical edge, and allowed it to become instrumentalised, reflecting the technicist character of its practice.
AB - In the quarter-century that SLS has been published, regulation has emerged as a new, and for many exciting, inter-disciplinary field. The concept itself requires a wider view of normativity than the narrow positivist one of law as command. It is certainly protean, ranging over many fundamental questions about the changing nature of the public sphere of politics and the state, and its interactions with the ‘private’ sphere of economic activity and social relations, as well as the mediation of these interactions, especially through law. This survey aims to outline and evaluate some of the main contours of the field as it has developed in this recent period, focusing on the regulation of economic activity. Regulation is seen as having emerged with the withdrawal by governments from direct provision of many economic and social services, to be replaced by corporatist bureaucracies and quasi-public agencies managing the complex public-private interactions of financialised capitalism. The arguments for ‘smart’ regulation have, in an era fixated on neo-liberalism, generally legitimised delegation of responsibility to big business. Its advocates, having been drawn into policy fields, have perhaps too often lost their critical edge, and allowed it to become instrumentalised, reflecting the technicist character of its practice.
KW - Corporations
KW - capitalism
KW - expertise
KW - governance
KW - indeterminacy
KW - international
KW - multi-level
KW - reflexive
KW - regulation
U2 - 10.1177/0964663917729873
DO - 10.1177/0964663917729873
M3 - Journal article
VL - 26
SP - 676
EP - 699
JO - Social and Legal Studies
JF - Social and Legal Studies
SN - 0964-6639
IS - 4
ER -