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This article examines the rise of algorithmic trading and the invention of new financial instruments, their implications and effects. It politicizes and denaturalizes the technological 'innovations' that have created networks of control over groups that states and corporations have designated as threatening, then examines how such 'innovations' have transformed stock market trading from a geographically-fixed, paper-based institution to a high-speed electronic casino. Finally, it discusses how and why financial actors have amassed the social, economic and political power that allows them to engage in practices that cause immense social harm while remaining virtually untouched by state regulatory agencies, civil and criminal law.

This article examines the perspectives, strategies and practical `common sense' of those charged with regulating and enforcing securities laws in the post-Enron era. It argues that crackdown periods following stock market disasters disrupt dominant patterns of governance and empower regulators to proactively enforce laws against powerful financial actors. The article shows how officials negotiate their regulatory terrain and accommodate the economic and social capital of the `stakeholders' they are charged with regulating outside crisis periods and how they re-interpret and redefine their mission in response to political, economic and ideological change. Empirically the article is based on 21 interviews with regulators and enforcement staff in securities commissions and law enforcement, and on the discourses and directives found in key regulatory documents.

This article examines how relations of governance generate particular forms of resistance, and the mechanisms through which resistance can reconfigure governance. It seeks to clarify actual and potential links between resistance, transformative politics and ameliorative change. Empirically it documents an environmental disaster in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, when seven people died and 2300 became ill after E. Coli contaminated public drinking water in May of 2000. Following a Public Inquiry and nine months of Hearings, the intensely critical O'Connor Report explained the disaster as resulting from policies adopted by Ontario's neo-liberal government and its 'Common Sense Revolution'. The Report forced government to re-regulate and restaff the Ministry of the Environment. To understand how this critical narrative was produced and why it was heard, the article situates the Inquiry process in its historical, cultural and political context. Focusing on two particular forms of knowledge/power, science and law, it argues that the universalistic truth claims of science were allied with the normative and procedural claims of law to challenge hegemonic power and interrogate the truth claims of neo-liberal government. Resistance in this case took local form, but its roots and resonance came from history, timing, and world-wide struggles against globalization, free trade and the ever-expanding American empire.

This commentary traces the genealogy of "theft of time," a newly discovered offence committed by employees against employers. A Foucauldian perspective is used to examine how truth claims from science, technology, and law constitute categories through which groups are sorted, classified, and censured: the processes of naming, blaming, and shaming. This commentary argues that to understand why some truth claims are heard and acted upon, while others are ignored or silenced, it is necessary to link the power/knowledge nexus to political economy, the structural dominance of capital, and the power relations thereby created and reinforced.

The phenomenon of "time theft," or an employee's misuse of an employer's time & property is described. Existing literature on the topic is reviewed, & specific instances of "time theft" are outlined. The actual cost of "time theft," estimated to reach approximately $200 billion per year, is argued to be a dangerous social problem. Existing solutions to the problem, such as employee monitoring, surveillance, & legal recourse are discussed. It is concluded that "time theft" is a paradoxical trend in this age when employers are demanding more from & offering less to their employees. 31 References. K. Larsen

AbstractThis paper argues that understanding the potential roles law and the state can play as transformative tools in counter-hegemonic feminist struggle requires that they be historically and structurally situated and contextualized, for both can be and have been facilitative as well as repressive. The paper examines, first, the negative consequences of using criminal law and the criminal justice system as instruments of reform, arguing that criminal law lacks transformative potential because of its particular role vis-à-vis the welfare state, dominant ideologies, and the struggle for change. Rights struggles are examined next, and it is argued that feminists should engage with law only under certain specified conditions to advance particular aims. The paper suggests some legal dead ends feminists should avoid, then examines alternative strategies which, it is argued, have the potential to empower and thereby to produce real and lasting improvements in women's lives.

It is argued that the dependence of the feminist movement on the state, particularly on criminal law, is wrong for practical, moral, & theoretical reasons. Examination of the nineteenth- & twentieth-century reforms sought & achieved by the first & second waves of feminism in areas such as prostitution, rape/sexual assault, & juvenile delinquency leads to the conclusion that such measures have promoted state surveillance & control over working & lower class women without ameliorating the conditions that gave rise to the law (which in some cases has exacerbated these). It is argued that investing power in a bureaucracy like the criminal justice system, whose agenda is antithetical to the aims of feminism, promotes the illusion that problems originating in patriarchy & capitalism can be addressed by individualistic, microlevel reforms. Addressed in closing are issues of social transformation & methods that have the potential to advance feminist aims as well as address women's real injuries. 139 References. AA

This paper focuses on the passage and enforcement of laws regulating the corporate sector, specifying patterns which seem to emerge from this literature in the major English speaking democracies.The creation of regulatory laws, the typical resistance by the industry and the state, and the crucial role of crises in the successful passage of laws are examined first. The patterns which law enforcement follows, and the key role of the regulatory agency in shaping these, are delineated next. The theoretical implications of these empirically based generalizations are then set out.The author argues that neither the pluralist nor the mainstream Marxist analyses adequately explain the very real progress that has occurred over the past 400 years in containing corporate crime, because it has happened largely in spite of rather than because of laws and regulatory activity. Real reform resulted because ongoing struggles forged a change at the ideological level, and this in turn led to improvements at the level of production. By raising the price of legitimacy for corporations in a particular nation‐state, prolaterian groups and their allies can create the conditions for change. Law and regulatory agencies have been of secondary importance, it is argued, in the struggle to restrain the predatory behavior of the corporate sector.