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Around the world today, access to justice enjoys an energetic and passionate resurgence. It is an object both of scholarly inquiry and political contest, and both a social movement and a value commitment that motivates study and action. Though the recent resurgence makes much seem new, in fact access to justice has been a topic of policy advocacy and empirical research since the early 20th century (e.g., Smith, 1919). One legacy of early work is scholars’ and practitioners’ tendency to conceptualize access as a social problem that is faced by lower status groups, such as poor people. Another legacy is a penchant for reducing, in a whole variety of ways, questions of justice to matters of law. Given this orienting framework, classical access to justice research focuses heavily on empirically documenting how law falls short of its supposed promise. At the same time, classical research often relied on an expansion of law – more or more affordable lawyers, more or more welcoming courts and hearing tribunals, wider participation on juries, new and better rights – as the policy solution to injustice or inequality.

Public administration as an aspect of governmental activity has existed as long as political systems have been functioning and trying to achieve program objectives set by the political decision-makers. Public administration as a field of systematic study is much more recent. Advisers to rulers and commentators on the workings of government have recorded their observations from time to time in sources as varied as Kautilya's Arthasastra in ancient India, the Bible, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's The Prince, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cameralism, concerned with the systematic management of governmental affairs, became a specialty of German scholars in Western Europe. In the United States, such a development did not take place until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the publication in 1887 of Woodrow Wilson's famous essay, “The Study of Administration,” generally considered the starting point. Since that time, public administration has become a well-recognized area of specialized interest, either as a subfield of political science or as an academic discipline in its own right.

The paper argues that the form, structure and ideologies of elites are embedded in particular forms of capitalism. Whilst elites in these different societies are engaged in a common task of ensuring that their position is sustained and protected in the light of economic and political uncertainties, the way in which they are able to do this is shaped by the particular forms of legitimation, coordination and cohesion that are embedded in particular institutional trajectories, path dependencies and complementarities. However, the paper emphasizes that these institutional structures are dependent on particular international economic orders and when these change either over the short or the long term, elites often find themselves struggling to maintain their position without significant changes. The paper examines firstly how the long-term change from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism in the international economic order led to changes in the terrain on which elites in different countries formed and exercised power and secondly how the immediate and drastic short-term changes in the global economy arising from the financial crisis has impacted on elites.

Purpose – In this chapter, I examine critically the assumption in the literature that many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law, and especially large law firms, due to lawyer dissatisfaction. I take a macro focus on employee flows and networks at large law firms, particularly at the elite level.Methodology/approach – I use a large archival data set of alumni data, internal memos, and newsletters from the 1930s through the 1990s from four large New York City corporate law firms. I perform statistical analysis of 2800 cases. I also include qualitative analysis of the newsletters and firm records of comings and goings. I analyze lawyer migration as a mobility project of lawyers in conjunction with Domhoff#x02019;s class-domination theory to explain the interconnectedness of the corporate community, policy networks, governmental positions, the federal judiciary, and high-powered private lawyers.Findings – I explore the various ways that lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations. It is clear that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Elite lawyers in large firms make both corporate and political connections through their migration, connections that have important repercussions not only for the lawyers but from their original firms.Originality/value of chapter – A fundamental question for sociological analyses of elite professions, and a more practical concern in the field of legal studies, is why do so many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law? The focus of these accounts, both journalistic and academic, is on the fact that lawyers leave – and, in particular, that they leave the practice of law entirely. The explanatory variable, in many cases, is some variation on individual lawyer dissatisfaction. Instead, I show that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations.

Corporate elites are increasingly held responsible for issues of sustainability including working conditions and workers’ rights in global production networks. We still know relatively little about how they respond to concrete stakeholder initiatives aiming to restrict corporate voluntarism through transnational regulation. In this paper we report comparative findings on corporate legitimation strategies in response to requests by labor representatives to sign Global Framework Agreements (GFAs). These agreements are intended to hold multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for the implementation of core labor standards across their supply chains. We propose to broaden management-focused analyses of corporate legitimation strategies by applying a field-oriented perspective that considers the embeddedness of management in a broader web of strategic activity and variable opportunity structures. Our findings suggest that legitimation strategies are developed dynamically along with the rules, positions, and understandings developing around specific regulatory issues in sequences of interactions between elites and challenging groups.

This chapter sums up the previous chapters beginning with personal life stories of how school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) disastrously affects the lives of students, most especially African American youth, Chicano youth, working-class students, and those with disabilities. From there we moved to the institutional level where the authors described factors in schools that contribute to the STPP. Also at the institutional level, contributing authors critically examined current approaches in schools, which were designed to help dismantle the STPP. Finally, from policy prospective the contributing authors explained how some existing policies could be used differently to disrupt the STPP. After each summary, we present bullet points suggesting what we (school stakeholders – leaders, faculty, etc., and policy makers) can do right now to disrupt the STPP.

Despite Max Weber’s assertion that bureaucracy is domination on the basis of knowledge, mainstream public administration literature has paid little attention to the role of experts and expertise in bureaucratic organisations. A particular blind spot concerns the academic professions or disciplines that supply the experts and expert knowledge used in government bureaucracies. It is well known that the educational composition of the civil service varies across countries and over time. However, knowledge about what explains the varying position of expert professions within state bureaucracies is scarce. The chapter examines this issue through a comparative-historical investigation of the role in government of a particular expert profession, namely economists. Focusing on a small set of countries – Norway, Denmark, New Zealand and Ireland – over the period from 1930 to 1990, it poses the question: How can we account for the variation in the position of economists within government bureaucracies across countries and over time? To answer this question, the chapter draws on theory from the sociological literature on professions and historical-institutionalist work on the influence of economic ideas.

Building on relational inequality theory, this paper incorporates social capital as a device to trace the flow of resources through relationships originating within and beyond organizations. I draw on a survey of over 1,700 lawyers to evaluate key dynamics of social capital that shape earnings: bridging and bonding, reciprocity exchanges and sponsorship, and boundary maintenance. The findings show social capital lends a lift to law graduates through bridges to professional careers and sponsorship following job entry. Racial minorities, however, suffer a shortfall of personal networks to facilitate job searches, and once having secured jobs, minorities experience social closure practices by clients and colleagues that disadvantage them in their professional work. A sizeable earnings gap remains between racial minority and white lawyers after controlling for human and social capitals, social closure practices, and organizational context. This earnings gap is particularly large among racial minorities with more years of experience and those working in large law firms. The findings demonstrate the importance of identifying the interrelations that connect social network and organizational context to impact social inequality.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to relate to the reader how overlapping advancements in technology and the diffusion of popular music into the habitus of listeners have provided the framework for an instrumental rationalization of litigious approaches to copyright protection by their owners. Namely, the personalization of music, which has evolved with the aid of technological advancements, has privatized music consumption, thus establishing socio-legal parameters that limit consumption to an individual action.

Design/methodology/approach – We discuss the concepts of habitus and taste, communality in music ownership, communicative action, and technology-driven consumption as they relate to the instrumental rationalization of industry-led governance structures defining music ownership rights. These arguments are supported in part by a consideration of historic examples of tension and responding legal actions.

Findings – The primary outcome from this chapter is to illustrate the extent to which the recording industry has traditionally held a role in guiding copyright policy. The chapter concludes by illustrating the current legitimation crises encountered by the recording industry and policy makers as consumers abandon traditional ownership paradigms en masse.

Originality/value of chapter – The technologies associated with the Internet and music consumption continue to evolve. This chapter highlights the differing interests in controlling music interests, and casts light on how agency has influenced structural developments central to copyright.