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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.

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.

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.

Based on an in-depth case study in the French nuclear industry, this chapter describes what happens when law’s ambiguity meets organizational complexity. While regulation studies suggest that organizations assign managerial values (such as efficiency or flexibility) to their compliance structures, this research focuses on the mixed role of purchasing managers in these processes. Constituting the missing link when explaining the legal regulation of economic activities, these intermediaries defend a financial conception of the firm against a more technical performance oriented solution. This financial conception did not emerge from nowhere, but resulted from the institutionalization of a particular meaning of business regulation within the nuclear industry. However, if values guide organizational behavior, the behavior of the actors can under no circumstances be reduced to these values. Conflicts, misunderstandings, and mistakes are a constitutive part of these process, too.

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.

The legal devices crafted within large organizations are a key component of legal endogeneity theory (LET). While symbolically complying with legislation, legal devices allow organizations to infuse managerial logics into the legal field, which eventually diverts law from its initial political goals. Although the LET has considered legal devices such as anti-discrimination guidelines and grievance procedures, this chapter argues that contracts also constitute a locus of symbolic compliance and contribute to the eventual endogenization of regulation. Supplementing LET with a focus on legal intermediation, this chapter explores how contracts are crafted and used by large organizations to respond to regulatory pressure. While other legal instruments are unambiguously managerialized from the outset, contracts are highly versatile legal objects that perform the seemingly opposite functions of symbolically complying with regulation and serving substantive commercial purposes. This discussion of the role of contracts as compliance mechanisms is based on an in-depth empirical study of the French retail industry and its response to a set of regulations that aimed at making their business practices fairer.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the specific “shareholder's” concept of transparency.

It considers that indirect securities holding systems limit the degree of “post-trading” transparency. The main concern is that an adverse effect of globalized capital markets is that the actual shareholders are not registered in the official registries and registrations are effected in the name of intermediaries acting on their behalf. It further considers that new EU legislative action should be taken to address the legal issues of securities holdings as a key parameter for EU integration.

A new architecture of the securities holding system is proposed in this paper to be adopted at the EU level on the basis of the analyzed direct registration, i.e. registration of all the actual shareholders in the registries. It is considered that this architecture will promote securities holdings transparency for all systems, either direct or indirect, and hence enhance investors' protection and financial confidence in the markets. Focusing on the financial crisis of the recent years, it is worthy of note that a key parameter in solving this crisis problem could be considered not only the imposition of more possible regulatory requirements on all financial players but also the improvement credibility of the markets by making their operation more transparent. Direct registration could be defined as a method of making the markets more transparent in this regard.

In the light of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, this is one of the first studies, which clearly argues that direct registration could be considered the appropriate method of making the financial markets more transparent. Therefore, it calls for the EU legal intervention should therefore be accelerated. By delaying improvement in the efficiency of the available infrastructures mainly by utilizing all the advantages that technology offers, the markets accept the additional cost of higher risk coverage.

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 chapter deals with labour conditions and discrimination of migrant workers in Italy, with a particular focus on the agricultural sector in two Southern Italian areas: Northern Basilicata and Western Sicily. The first part of the chapter describes the history of migration to Italy and the most relevant transformations occurred over the last years, as well as an overview of the relevant legislation on migration and racial discrimination at work. The second part, on the basis of two ethnographic studies realized by the two authors, analyses the complex intertwinement of structural and symbolic violence in determining the conditions of exploitation and discrimination of migrant seasonal labourers in the two areas. The study focuses on three topics: piecework payment; the ghettoization and segregation of seasonal labourers; the system of informal and illegal labour intermediation called caporalato. It is argued that that the main source of symbolic violence is represented by the brokers called caporali, who are usually of the same nationality of the labourers. If, on a certain extent, migrant workers perceive their ghettoization, discrimination and exploitation as ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’, this is due to the communitarian relationships built and manipulated by the caporali. On the contrary, the State and the local administrations seem to act exclusively as a source of structural violence. The national legislation on migration, as well as the lack of public policies concerning labour intermediation, transport and accommodation for seasonal labourers, appears as the main reason of the vulnerability of migrant workers in the considered areas.