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"The issue of whether and the extent to which transnational risk can be regulated through a social sphere goes to the heart of what John Ruggie has described as 'embedded liberalism': the story of how capitalist countries learned to reconcile the efficiency of markets with the values of social community that markets themselves require in order to survive and thrive. This edited collection is located in wider debates about global capitalism and its regulation, a debate that is at the cutting edge of academic scholarship and contemporary public policy developments. The collection tackles the challenge of finding a way forward for regulation that does not accept the old division of regulation into economic and social fields, as if these two were conceptually and empirically distinct. Instead this rich, multidisciplinary collection of essays engages with a critical central theme -- namely the idea of regulating through a social sphere -- which recognises the embeddedness of economic transactions within a social and political landscape. A key strength of this book is its integration of three distinct areas of scholarship: Karl Polanyi's economic sociology, regulation studies and socio-legal studies of transnational risks. The collection is distinct in that it links the study of specific transnational risk regulatory regimes back to a social-theoretical discussion about economy-society interactions, informed by Polanyi's work. Critically, the concept of regulating through a social sphere is explored in a manner that ensures coherence of the work as a whole and offers new insights to readers. Each chapter addresses the way in which economics, as well as economic and social regulation, can never be understood separately from the social particularly in the transnational context. The collection is relevant to a wide academic audience in the field of regulation studies, law, sociology, economics and political science."--Bloomsbury Publishing

This response to the special issue on 'Governing Celebrity: Multiculturalism, Offensive Television Content and Celebrity Big Brother' highlights its contribution to key socio-legal debates about popular legal consciousness, responsive regulation and social change through law. The response also discusses some of the methodological challenges posed by research into media regulation. How should such research be theoretically framed and is it necessary to distinguish clearly between deconstructionist and modernist understandings of human rights? Are social-psychological dynamics a relevant factor for explaining whether some forms of speech become labelled as racist? The concluding section provides suggestions for further research into the patterns that shape how socio-legal researchers read the social world and how the opening up of a new field of inquiry – the governance of celebrity – can be extended to understanding celebrity politics.

This special issue draws together four contributions to debates about legal regulation.1They focus on space and interactions as key constituents of regulatory dynamics. The articles advance analysis of legal regulation also on the basis of new empirical data. Two contributions discuss novel forms of regulation, such as meta-regulation and the reform of health and safety regulation in Thailand. Two further articles examine the challenges faced by traditional state regulation through new tasks of systemic risk management, such as facilitating law and science interactions and ensuring animal disease control. The authors share a commitment to a range of fundamental values informing regulation, such as respect for animal welfare, the protection of the health and safety of workers, visions of justice which involve redistributive values and a concern with context-sensitive, proceduralized law which operates with a reflexive awareness of its own limitations. The first part of this introduction outlines space and interactions as key themes in the literature on legal regulation while the second part highlights the contribution of the articles in this area.

This article explores compliance in the context of environmental regulation. It rejects a formal concept of compliance according to which statements about compliance can be made by assessing a self-contained notion of social practices of the regulated in the light of formal legal rules. Linked to this type of analysis is the notion of a 'gap' between formal legal requirements and what the regulated do in practice. In examining this perspective critically the article argues that the concepts of rules and social practices have to be seen not as self-contained categories but as closely linked. These close links are created both on a level of behaviour, through what the regulators and the regulated actually do in practice, and on a level of meaning of rules. Thus the notion of a 'gap' needs to be complemented through a concept of integration between rules and social practices. The article develops this argument by drawing first on literature on enforcement, discretion and creative compliance; and second by relying on qualitative empirical data on the implementation of a waste management site licence by staff at a waste treatment plant and the enforcement activities of waste control officers.