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This article starts from the assumption that economic sociology, including Karl Polanyi’s work, can contribute fresh perspectives to regulation debates because it opens up new understandings of the nature of economic activity, a key target of legal regulation. In particular this article examines Polanyi’s idea that society drives regulation. For Polanyi the “regulatory counter-movement” is society’s response to the disembedding – in particular through the proliferation of markets – of economic out of social relationships. Section One of the article identifies three key challenges that arise from this Polanyian take on regulation for contemporary regulation researchers. First, Polanyi focuses on social norms restraining business behavior, but neglects social norms embedded in law as also shaping regulation. Second, he seems to imply a clear-cut conceptual distinction between “economy” and “society.” Third, his analysis sidelines the role of interest politics in the development of regulation.

Addressing the first of these three key challenges, Section Two of this article therefore argues that a Polanyian vision of “socialized” legal regulation should build on contemporary accounts of responsive law and regulation, which focus attention on social norms informing legal regulation. Section Three of this article tackles the second key challenge raised by Polanyi’s work for contemporary regulation researchers, that is, how to transcend a modernist perspective of “economy” and “society” as clearly demarcated, distinct fields of social action. It argues that discourse theory is an important alternative theoretical resource. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, the article suggests that understanding “economy” and “society” as performed by open and relationally constructed discourses helps to capture interconnections between “economy” and “society” that become particularly visible when we analyze how specific regulatory regimes work at a medium- and small-scale level. These points are further brought to life in Section Four through a discussion of the European Union (EU) regulatory regime for trade in risky, transgenic agricultural products, and in particular the current reform debates about the consideration of the “socioeconomic impacts” of such products.

China has achieved continuous economic growth and become more integrated with the global economy since the start of the current financial crisis in late 2008. As the second largest economy in the world, China's political policies, economic and social development have influence on global economy. Attention has been paid worldwide to the current Chinese legal system, political policies and the development of economic reform since China entered the World Trade Organisation in November 2001. The corporate governance reform is the centre of the enterprise reform. In September 1999, The Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party's 15th central Committee identified that corporate governance is the core of the modern enterprise system. In recent years China has made significant progress in developing the foundations of a modern corporate system. There are more than 1,200 companies which have successfully diversified their ownership through public listing and 80% of small and medium size companies have been transformed into non-state-owned enterprises. More and more state-owned enterprises are on the way to transforming into corporations. China has formed a legal framework for corporate governance.

Laws, regulations, and policies, including specific intergovernmental visa agreements, exert significant influences on people’s mobility and cross-border travels. Such forces are powerful in shaping the emerging Asian tourism market. This chapter provides a critical review and analysis of the laws and regulations that have shaped Chinese outbound tourism. It first reviews the evolution of China’s policies and government attitude toward outbound tourism. The three tourism administration regulations promulgated by the State Council are then reviewed and their implications for outbound tourism are discussed. The Tourism Law enacted in 2013 is reviewed and discussed separately due to its significance and supreme power in China’s legal system. Finally, the chapter discusses the impact of intergovernmental visa facilitation arrangements on Chinese outbound tourism.

International humanitarian law (IHL) is struggling to catch up with military technological development. The international community is increasingly alarmed at the prospect of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) operating without a human interface. The international community’s concern with autonomous enabling technology in weapon systems is whether weapon systems with the ability to identify, select, and attack military targets with little to no human control can comply with existing IHL rules and be morally and ethically acceptable.

This chapter explores an expanded concept of social licence to operate (SLO) to regulate the development of LAWS. The authors believe that it is more efficacious to take a preventative and precautious approach by holding the developers accountable to IHL during the gestation period instead of following a post facto approach. The authors argue that the process involved in issuing or revoking an SLO for the developers of LAWS is already beginning to emerge in IHL. The SLO is only effective during the developmental cycle and would continue as soft law form in regulating the use of LAWS until a more concrete, treaty-based response emerges. In this sense, the SLO can be seen as a catalyst towards a concerted international response to regulate the development, deployment, and use of LAWS.

This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

This chapter is about online hate speech propagated via platforms operated by social media companies (SMCs). It examines the options open to states in forcing SMCs to take responsibility for the hateful content that appears on their sites. It examines the technological and legal context for imposing legal obligations on SMCs, and analyses initiatives in Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union and elsewhere. It argues that while SMCs can play a role in controlling online hate speech, there are limitations to what they can achieve.

Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.

This paper discusses issues and developments that relate to the teaching of bank regulation in tertiary institutions. It looks at how course content, teaching texts and methodology can become subject to issues like specific historical, and jurisdictional, cultures and contexts for the discipline. It considered how economic and political approaches impact such teaching. How banking regulations are used, and how course structures are built, show that these are matters which impinge on the type of bank personnel who later eventually leave academia and end up working on regulatory or compliance matters.

This introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be harnessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state regulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regulatory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the 2007 financial and subsequent EU sovereign debt crises, which have led to a major realignment of economy and society in a number of countries.

This introduction argues that economic sociology is a crucial reference point for understanding more about the social practices that constitute business behavior. It enables to explore the scope and significance of often interlinked social and legal norms for regulating various transnational risks that economic activity can give rise to. The introduction therefore locates the quest for understanding more about the regulatory capacity of a social sphere in debates that draw on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding of economic activity into social norms. The introduction highlights one of the key themes developed in this special issue, the idea of society within economy which questions an assumed conceptual distinction between economy and society.

This introduction concludes by specifying how the accounts of risk regulation developed in this special issue chart a path that is different from recent explorations of the role of a social sphere in regulation, which were conducted under the banner of “the sociological citizen,” “regulatory sociability,” and “collaborative governance.”