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Supplier flexibility reflects a supplier's operations-related decisions in responsively providing the necessary inputs to the focal firm. Drawing on resource-dependency theory and transaction cost economics, this study develops a conceptual framework to explain the differential effects of a focal firm's power over supplier flexibility in the context of the hub-and-spoke supply chain (SC). This study also considers the goals shared between the focal firm and its suppliers as an important contingency factor within the framework.

This study tests the proposed conceptual framework using dyadic survey data from a hub-and-spoke SC consisting of a large construction contractor and its 100 suppliers in Indonesia.

The findings show that coercive power has an inverted U-shaped effect on supplier flexibility, while legal-legitimate power has a U-shaped effect. Furthermore, shared goals positively moderate the U-shaped effect between legal-legitimate power and supplier flexibility.

This study differentiates between the impacts of coercive power and legal-legitimate power on supplier flexibility in the hub-and-spoke SC. It also demonstrates that shared goals play a moderating role in affecting the impacts of legal-legitimate power on supplier flexibility. These findings also have important implications with regard to integrating resource-dependency theory and transaction cost economics to explain these associations.

Through an analysis of texts and interviews with sanctuary providers from sanctuary incidents in Canada, this paper first details how sanctuary is made possible by pastoral and non-state sovereign powers. It then argues at least three stories of law are instantiated in sanctuary discourse. Law is at times arbitrary and unpredictable. In other instances, a ‘higher’ law authorizes sanctuary. Law is also a broader game in which lawyers are relied upon and sanctuary becomes a tactic to ‘win’. These legal narratives work together to constitute sanctuary and are instantiations of pastoral and sovereign powers at the level of the subject.

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.

My way or the highway: A stronger partner in humanitarian relief collaboration often seeks control over its weaker partners by leveraging diverse power tactics that may be non-coercive or coercive in nature. In this backdrop, this research accentuates the perspective of weaker partners to understand how a weaker partner drives collaborative synergy under power tactics. Weaker partner in the collaborative dyad resembles the humanitarian organization (HO) who is less capable in terms of access to resources. This partner is further dependent on the stronger HO's directives to participate in the relief work.

Based on social exchange theory (SET), a collaborative dyad in humanitarian relief work is visualized from the perspectives of power and power disparity. In terms of power, mediated power tactics such as legal, coercive and reward powers are considered. Disparity recognizes the presence of a stronger and a weaker partner. Set also magnifies the insight on conflict and trust that can respectively hamper and improve the synergy between partners. In total, 295 executives representing self-reported weaker HOs are surveyed.

Legal power, as experienced by the weaker partner, bears a positive impact over collaborative performance to improve collaborative synergy. Coercive power shows a negative impact. Reward power again bears a positive impact. Coercion can complicate collaborative synergy by establishing conflicts. Yet, the trust of weaker partner on stronger HO positively moderates the negative impact of conflict over collaborative performance.

This research invokes the view of power disparity to explain synergy in inter-organizational collaboration from the perspective of weaker partners.

This essay outlines a critical theory of everyday resistance. This theory adopts a de-centered conception of law and power, and draws upon the theory of deliberative democracy to specify the conditions under which such power becomes illegitimate. This allows us to see everyday resistance as a symptom that discursive power has been generated under unjust conditions. Such an approach opens a new path of research in which we study everyday resistance as a response to the participatory deficits that exist in contemporary systems of power, and then identify the possibilities and obstacles for remedying those deficits.

This study aims to examine the relationships between power, relationship commitment and customer integration by replicating and extending Zhao et al. (2008) in China and the USA.

This study collects data from 210 manufacturers in China and 202 manufacturers in the USA. In this study, structural equation modelling is used to analyse the data.

This study finds that normative relationship commitment is positively associated with customer integration and expert and referent power are positively associated with normative relationship commitment in China and the USA. Reward and coercive power are positively associated with instrumental relationship commitment in China, whereas referent power is negatively associated. Referent, legal legitimate and reward power are positively associated with instrumental relationship commitment in the USA, whereas expert and legitimate power are negatively associated.

This study provides empirical evidence on the distinct impacts of different bases of mediated and non-mediated power in China and the USA, contributing to the development of the power-relationship commitment theory. The findings also provide insights into where and when the theory applies. The results can provide guidelines for managers to adjust the use of power to improve relationship commitment and customer integration in China and the USA.

In In Re Widening of Beekman Street, a nineteenth century legal case in New York State which involved questions of who owned the bodies of the dead – whether it was the state, the church who owned the land where they were buried or the relatives of the deceased – we see an interesting legal aporia. Claims of ownership were complicated by the idea that the dead perhaps owned themselves, having once been full legal subjects. In this and other legal cases in US law (with similar results in the UK as well) a kind of compromise is reached where, as the body decays, the question of its self-ownership becomes increasingly settled in favour of other parties. Yet, even in such cases, the body and its sense of personhood lingers to haunt, as it were, the certainties of law about who precisely owns whom The uncertainties that are made manifest among the dead have their equivalents among the living as well; the presence of slavery at the time meant that in some cases even living persons did not own themselves. In this mix of overlapping forms of self and other ownership then, we see an anxiety in the law, one that it must settle definitively even as the very terms of legal personhood resist the very closure that the law seeks.

Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights provided a path-breaking theoretical analysis of what he called the “myth of rights.” Scheingold's key insight was that even though rights were a myth, rights ideologies nevertheless left a significant imprint on American politics. The book charted a research agenda that has now been followed by a wide range of sociolegal scholars. Looking across that diverse body scholarship, I find convergence on two points. First, scholars claim that law and legal ideology contribute to processes of legitimation and to political acquiescence. Second, and seemingly in tension with the first, most people do not appear to believe in idealized legal myths and express only qualified commitments to legal ideals. Most scholars have responded to this tension by downplaying evidence that people have doubts about legal ideals, often treating expressions of doubts as evidence of confusion. As a result, scholars still conclude that residual commitments to legal myths help to explain legitimation and acquiescence. Such moves produce accounts of legal myths that are insufficiently attentive to politics and power. Scholars would do better to return to Scheingold's more ambivalent perspective on the politics of rights in order to understand the political consequences of commitments to rights’ ideologies.

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.