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Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

Legal intermediation is an emerging theoretical concept developed to grasp the importance of the process and actors who contribute to legal endogenization, in particular in the field of economic activities and work governed by various public regulations. This chapter proposes to extend the analytical category of legal intermediary to all actors who, even if they are not legal professionals, deal on a daily basis with legal categories and provisions. In order to deepen our understanding of these actors and their contribution to how organizations frame legality, this chapter investigates four examples of legal intermediaries who are not legal professionals. Based on field surveys conducted over the past 15 years in France on employment policy, industrial relations, occupational health and safety regulation, and forensic economics, I make three contributions. First, the cases show the diversity of legal intermediaries and their growing and increasingly reflexive roles in our complex economies. Second, while they are not legal professionals per se, to different degrees, these legal intermediaries assume roles similar to those of legal professionals such as legislators, judges, lawyers, inspectors, cops, and even clerks. Finally, depending on their level of legitimacy and power, I show how legal intermediaries take part in the process of legal endogenization and how they more broadly frame ordinary legality.

Since the 1990s, the French government has offered tax exemptions for people who buy property and rent it out for at least nine years. This legal framework, centered on incentives, can be considered a new kind of (de)regulation of housing policy, triggering a multiplication of private intermediaries devoted to finding clients for tax exemptions. Based on interviews with 28 investors who feel they have been abused (many of them have started legal proceedings against professionals from whom they bought a property), this study provides a new entry for analyzing legal intermediation, showing that it does not affect all laypeople in the same way, especially when looking at the latter’s social and economic resources. We analyze how and with what devices professionals, whose commercial practices are not fully regulated by law, rely on the law for the success of their transactions, especially with taxpayers who have money to become investors but who are not rich enough to pay for the services of a tax professional. We argue that the ability to resist the appeal of putting money into investments that turned out risky depends on investors’ social and economic resources. Finally, we analyze how the process of legal intermediation described in this chapter impacts investors’ legal consciousness and creates distrust toward the law.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

At every period of time marked by years, the seasons by turns and twists in history, among country folk especially, the years of great storms and hard winters; in law enforcement, the passing of some far‐reaching, profound statutory measure, there is this almost universal tendency to look back—over your shoulder‐assessing changes, progressive or otherwise, discerning trends and assaying prospects. We are about to emerge from the seventies—battered but unbowed!—into the new decade of the eighties, perhaps with a feeling that things can only get better.

Examines the impact of employment regulation on owner‐manager approaches to the employment relationship at the level of the individual firm. While there was no reported principled opposition to extending employment rights as suggested by a number of earlier studies, the cumulative effect of recent legislation was perceived by owner‐managers to be reducing their competitiveness by placing costly and time‐consuming demands on the smaller business. The case study companies were increasingly formalising their employment processes largely to defend their decisions against potential litigation. Despite certain acknowledged benefits, this increasing proceduralisation was held to be detrimental to the informality and flexibility viewed as essential to effective working relationships in the smaller enterprise. Continuing recruitment difficulties combined with the costs associated with expanding regulation led the majority of the case study companies to identify an investment in automation and labour‐saving equipment as a preferable long‐term option to the expansion of the workforce.

This chapter develops a novel conceptualization of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and identifies possible avenues for further research in the international business (IB) and related fields.

A conceptual chapter examining the existing definitions of CSI and proposing a classification of irresponsible behaviours using an international law approach.

The concept of CSI has been weakly conceptualized and measured so far. We improve this by distinguishing between unethical conduct bearing no direct impact on human rights and those behaviours that do entail a human rights impact. Next, we classify human rights abuses in two categories based on whether they entail the violation of a derogable or a non-derogable human right. Finally, we make a distinction between direct and indirect irresponsible actions. These distinctions are also illustrated empirically.

This chapter bridges the gap between IB, management and international law research on human rights or else defined irresponsible behaviours. Our novel conceptualization of CSI can help to better address unanswered questions about factors driving CSI in IB firms.

PRESIDENT of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Charles Carter is a leading economist. So is it too much to expect him to speak sheer common sense all the time?

Earlier in the year, during the national steel industry strike, the House of Lords overturned a judgment of Lord Denning, MR, that sections of the industry unaffected by the trade dispute could be regarded as outside the Act and its amendments and that unions could be restrained in their application of immune activities to those firms. The decision apart, their Lordships in delivering judgment reaffirmed that only Parliament had power to make the Law; it was not the function of Judges to do this, their's to interpret and apply the Law. In strict legal terms and applying to statutes and statutory instruments, this is true; but in the widest sense, judges have been making law for centuries. Otherwise, from whence cometh the Common Law, one of the wonders of the world, if not from the mouths of H.M. Judges. Much of it is now enshrined in statute form, especially Criminal Law, but initially it was all judge‐made. In most systems of human control and function, complete separation is rarely possible and when attempted the results have not been conspicuously successful.

Natural selection—survival of the fittest—is as old as life itself. Applied genetics which is purposeful in contrast to natural selection also has a long history, particularly in agriculture; it has received impetus from the more exacting demands of the food industry for animal breeds with higher lean : fat and meat : bone ratios, for crops resistant to the teeming world of parasites. Capturing the exquisite scent, the colours and form beautiful of a rose is in effect applied genetics and it has even been applied to man. For example, Frederick the Great, Emperor of Prussia, to maintain a supply of very tall men for his guards—his Prussian Guards averaged seven feet in height—ordered them to marry very tall women to produce offspring carrying the genes of great height. In recent times, however, research and experiment in genetic control, more in the nature of active interference with genetic composition, has developed sufficiently to begin yielding results. It is self‐evident that in the field of micro‐organisms, active interference or manipulations will produce greater knowledge and understanding of the gene actions than in any other field or by any other techniques. The phenomenon of “transferred drug resistance”, the multi‐factorial resistance, of a chemical nature, transferred from one species of micro‐organisms to another, from animal to human pathogens, its role in mainly intestinal pathology and the serious hazards which have arisen from it; all this has led to an intensive study of plasmids and their mode of transmission. The work of the Agricultural Research Council's biologists (reported elsewhere in this issue) in relation to nitrogen‐fixing genes and transfer from one organism able to fix nitrogen to another not previously having this ability, illustrates the extreme importance of this new field. Disease susceptibility, the inhibition of invasiveness which can be acquired by relatively “silent” micro‐organisms, a better understanding of virulence and the possible “disarming” of organisms, particularly those of particular virulence to vulnerable groups. Perhaps this is looking for too much too soon, but Escherichia coli would seem to offer more scope for genetic experiments than most; it has serotypes of much variability and viability; and its life and labours in the human intestine have assumed considerable importance in recent years. The virulence of a few of its serotypes constitute an important field in food epidemiology. Their capacity to transfer plasmids—anent transfer of drug resistance— to strains of other organisms resident in the intestines, emphasizes the need for close study, with safeguards.