Suchergebnisse

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.

This article concerns two disputes that occurred between 2020–22 at the Coogee Women's Pool, a public ocean pool in Sydney reserved for use only by women. One contest concerned the governance of the pool by its Management Committee related to differing conceptions of the ethos of the pool and the nature of its custodianship. The other concerned the exclusion of trans women from the pool over the definition of 'women' allowed access to the facility. The article examines these disputes and the contests they generated in exploring when and how forms of law encourage or undermine relational regulation in the context of community-controlled public space. It draws on ideas about the commons elaborated by Silvia Federici and the concept of ethos articulated by Ivan Illich to understand the nature and value of community-controlled public space. The article links these ideas to the role of law in engaging with scholarship on the right to the city and rights to protest in relation to the commons. It draws on this framing, and uses interviews, primary and secondary sources, to closely study the recent history at the Women's Pool regarding governance of common space and issues of inclusion within the space. In looking at how law was used in relation to both aspects, it finds the idea of relational regulation helpful. The article suggests that light touch relational regulation might support the ethos of managed communal spaces, making room for deliberative practices that facilitate the resolution of challenging questions of membership and participation. The events in this small space of recreation prefigure possibilities for deliberation, care and (re)enchantment as a counter to neoliberal ordering.