300110 Regulation, Law and Organization (S) (WiSe 2015/2016)

Law, regulation and organisation establish an interesting field of sociological inquiry in two distinct, but interrelated ways: first, while regulatory scholar would assume the implementation of norms and rules to follow the intentions of the regulator, sociological studies show that organisation manage these external expectations in their own terms, they interpret rules and regulation and modify their behaviour not according to the regulators intentions, but according to their own logics. The focus on this aspect is not so much the divergence of expectation and practice in the enforcement of law, rather on the organisational structures and processes that guide these interpretations. Second, the formal structure of organisations has been interpreted as 'organisational law'. Organisational law however needs to be interpreted and often undermined in order to work. In terms of organisational sociology, this has been discussed as informality but recently new suggestions, for example relational regulation, open this field also for findings from the legal and regulatory field.

This seminar -- after a brief introduction in to the basic concepts -- will analyse case studies on the interrelatedness of law, regulation and organisation, ranging from environmental issue, bureaucratic control to corruption. The main scope is to understand the way formal expectations are dealt with by organisations.

Bibliography

Husing, R, & S.S., Silbey (2011) Governing the Gap: Forging safe science through relational regulation. Regulation & Governance 5 (1), pp 14-42