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"Social Citizenship in the Shadow of Competition explores how economic concepts and tools are reshaping regulatory law. Building on studies that link law - both institutionally and discursively - to the legitimation of economic neo-liberalism, the book charts lawmakers' attempts to justify social welfare regulation in the language imposed by economic theory. It presents new qualitative findings from an ambitious regulatory reform programme targeting over 1,700 pieces of legislation. Bronwen Morgan argues that the interplay between economic discourse and lawmaking does not destroy the possibility of social citizenship; however, the subsequent regulatory conversations frequently silence or weaken the claims of vulnerable groups. Thus, even when vulnerable groups secure instrumental success, economic conceptions of bureaucratic rationality impoverish their capacity to express certain kinds of intangible values and aspirations. To expand or retain social citizenship requires that we learn to conceive of what matters in political economy without relying on the logic of utility or other instrumental rationalities."--Provided by publisher.

This book demonstrates that a simple division between rights and regulation is no longer tenable. Interdisciplinary with fresh perspectives on socio-legal scholarship, the book shows that different combinations of rights and regulatory claims serve as barometers of current changes in political economy.

Purpose
This paper aims to explore the availability of new legal models for social enterprise development in Australia, asking the question: what does a distinctive focus on legal form add to the scholarly exploration of social enterprise? The paper has a dual purpose: firstly, to present a general empirical review of the fact, possible causes and implications of the absence of new legal models for social enterprise in Australia; and secondly, to make a polemical argument highlighting some of the advantages of developing a distinctive legal structure for social entrepreneurs in Australia.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper reconciles two contending accounts. One would stress the absence of new legal models (the "gap" analysis). The other would acknowledge the absence of new legal models, while stressing the relevance of existing legal models for pursuing social enterprise goals. Both accounts are descriptively true, but the tension between them relates in part to the level of analysis (legal-political, collective voluntary action or bottom-up individual actors) and, in part, to longstanding tensions in the conceptualisation of social enterprise.


Findings
The paper provides evidence of the rising salience of existing cooperative legal forms, rising diversity in the legal model choices of individual social enterprises and the emergence of two significant bottom-up developments in voluntary model rules. The legal-political bottleneck that remains is related to the constitutional structure of federal and state power, key macro-political policy trends in the late 1990s and the distinctive nature of the Australian "wage-earners" welfare state settlement.


Originality/value
The paper highlights that what may appear as a "gap" in the legal landscape of Australian social enterprise is more nuanced. Despite the striking absence of any distinct new legislated legal models, the overall situation is a complex landscape providing multiple threads for weaving together diverse forms of social enterprise. Although legal frameworks may not be as salient as governance design choices, they generate three important second-order effects: signalling, legitimation and professional networks. Taken together, these may support a case for the distinctive value of a specific hybrid legal model for social enterprise.

Recent developments in regulatory reform strategies increasingly focus on controlling the process of regulation itself, rather than regulating social and individual action directly. This article explores the reflexive systematization of regulatory policy by focusing on institutions and processes that embed regulatory review mechanisms deploying economic rationality into the every-day routines of governmental policy-making. It explores both the social logic underlying this phenomenon of 'meta-regulation', and its political implications, primarily in relation to a particular instance of meta-regulation established in Australia in the 1990s. The social logic of meta-regulation is characterized as an instance of nonjudicial legality, situated at the inter-section of two trends - an increasing legalization of politics and a growing reliance on nonjudicial mechanisms of accountability. The political implications can be summed up as an 'economization' of regulatory politics. Meta-regulation excludes competing ways of understanding regulatory policy choices, causing bureaucrats to 'translate' aspects of social welfare that previously may have been expressed in the language of need, vulnerability or harm into the language of market failures or market distortion. This process tends to silence certain critical modes of demanding justice, particularly those that rely on moral or distributive values.