Why Legal Transplants?

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 583-601
Author(s):  
Toby S. Goldbach

In examining how laws and legal institutions move across jurisdictions, comparative law scholars have employed the metaphor of a legal transplant to conceptualize both the hazards and benefits of taking in another legal system's rules. As law and society scholars become increasingly interested in the international domain, they will naturally seek out disciplines that have grappled with issues of law and culture, diffusion of governance structures, and the social processes involved in transnational lawmaking. We can thus learn a great deal from the rich literature on legal transplants. However, we should also be wary of its anemic examination of relations of power and strive to employ empirical methods to measure the social forces and factors involved. This article gives an historical overview of the key developments and debates within the legal transplant literature and suggests new directions for further research intended for a sociology of the movement of law.

Africa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Dilley

This article examines the specialized knowledge practices of two sets of culturally recognized ‘experts’ in Senegal: Islamic clerics and craftsmen. Their respective bodies of knowledge are often regarded as being in opposition, and in some respects antithetical, to one another. The aim of this article is to examine this claim by means of an investigation of how knowledge is conceived by each party. The analysis attempts to expose local epistemologies, which are deduced from an investigation of ‘expert’ knowledge practices and indigenous claims to knowledge. The social processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission are also examined with reference to the idea of initiatory learning. It is in these areas that commonalities between the bodies of knowledge and sets of knowledge practices are to be found. Yet, despite parallels between the epistemologies of both bodies of expertise and between their respective modes of knowledge transmission, the social consequences of ‘expertise’ are different in each case. The hierarchical relations of power that inform the articulation of the dominant clerics with marginalized craftsmen groups serve to profile ‘expertise’ in different ways, each one implying its own sense of authority and social range of legitimacy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892110622
Author(s):  
Jette Ernst

Struggles over new organisational technology are, almost without exception, studied inside organisations. This paper aims to advance our understanding of how technology is embedded in social forces and relations of power that reach beyond individual organisations. It examines the ongoing discursive struggles in public media outlets between consultant doctors and regional actors concerning a controversial electronic health record (EHR) system, called the Health Platform, which was implemented in 20 Danish hospitals. A theoretical framework inspired by Bourdieu’s understanding of discursive activity in a field subsumed in a multi-level and cultural understanding of framing is used to examine the interests connected to platform design and its organisational future states. It is demonstrated that winning the support of the public is pivotal in the construction of frames by both groups of actors in their efforts to define problems and solutions and, ultimately, influence a political decision concerning the platform’s future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Allen Talmage ◽  
Jocelyn Bell ◽  
Gheorghe Dragomir

PurposeThis paper aims to extend social entrepreneurship theory by investigating the darker sides of innovation and enterprise. Entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship theories regarding shifting equilibriums are considered alongside other traditions. This research presents how individuals see enterprises as dark and light and discusses how such perceptions are important to building emerging theories of light and dark social entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a survey of public perceptions (n= 631) regarding the social and economic impact of a total of 15 different enterprises to create a map of the darker variations of enterprises. An 11-point scale was used to evaluate perceived impact.FindingsThe mapping of each enterprise on a coordinate plane resulted in four thematic areas: traditional enterprises (light social, light economic), taboo enterprises (dark social, light economic), dark enterprises (dark social, dark economic) and alternative enterprises (light social, dark economic). Some enterprises crossed between the thematic areas.Research limitations/implicationsThis study opens up new directions for research on dark social entrepreneurship and research on enterprises that influence social equilibriums.Practical implicationsThis study provides guidance for practitioners and policymakers to better understand phenomena such as dark, taboo and alternative enterprises and their nuances.Social implicationsThis study allows for a broader look at social entrepreneurship, innovation and enterprise to better understand dark and light nuances. Similarities between the lighter and darker forms of enterprises are noted.Originality/valueThis study builds on dark entrepreneurship and dark social entrepreneurship theories and concepts using empirical methods.


1972 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Karabel

The expansion of the community colleges in recent years repeats an American pattern that couples class-based tracking with "educational inflation." Shaped by a changing economy and by the American ideology of equal opportunity, community colleges are moving toward vocational rather than transfer curricula and are channeling first generation college students into these programs. The author examines the social forces behind the community college movement and the social processes within the community colleges that have produced a submerged class conflict in higher education.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bayram Unal

This study deals with survival strategies of illegal migrants in Turkey. It aims to provide an explanation for the efforts to keep illegality sustainable for one specific ethnic/national group—that is, the Gagauz of Moldova, who are of Turkish ethnic origin. In order to explicate the advantages of Turkish ethnic origin, I will focus on their preferential treatment at state-law level and in terms of the implementation of the law by police officers. In a remarkable way, the juridical framework has introduced legal ways of dealing with the illegality of ethnically Turkish migrants. From the viewpoint of migration, the presence of strategic tools of illegality forces us to ask not so much law-related questions, but to turn to a sociological inquiry of how and why they overstay their visas. Therefore, this study concludes that it is the social processes behind their illegality, rather than its form, that is more important for our understanding of the migrants’ survival strategies in destination countries.


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of the development of the general sociological theory of J.G.Turner. These foundations are metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and an analytical scheme. Turner began to develop a general sociological theory with a synthesis of metatheoretical ideas of social forces and social selection. He formulated a synthetic metatheoretical statement: social forces cause selection pressures on individuals and force them to change the patterns of their social organization and create new types of sociocultural formations to survive under these pressures. Turner systematized the basic concepts of his theorizing with the allocation of micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social reality. On this basis, he substantiated a simple conceptual scheme of social dynamics. According to this scheme, the forces of macrosocial dynamics of the population, production, distribution, regulation and reproduction cause social evolution. These forces force individual and corporate actors to structurally adapt their communities in altered circumstances. Such adaptation helps to overcome or avoid the disintegration consequences of these forces. The initial stage of Turner's general theorizing is a kind of audit, modification, modernization and systematization of the conceptual apparatus of sociology. The initial results obtained became the basis for the development of his conception of the dynamics of functional selection in the social world.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


Author(s):  
Ralph Henham

This chapter sets out the case for adopting a normative approach to conceptualizing the social reality of sentencing. It argues that policy-makers need to comprehend how sentencing is implicated in realizing state values and take greater account of the social forces that diminish the moral credibility of state sponsored punishment. The chapter reflects on the problems of relating social values to legal processes such as sentencing and argues that crude notions of ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ approaches to policy-making should be replaced by a process of contextualized policy-making. Finally, the chapter stresses the need for sentencing policy to reflect those moral attachments that bind citizens together in a relational or communitarian sense. It concludes by exploring these assertions in the light of the sentencing approach taken by the courts following the English riots of 2011.


Author(s):  
Shenique S. Thomas ◽  
Johnna Christian

This chapter draws from a qualitative study of incarcerated men to investigate the social processes and interactions between both correctional authorities and family members that inform their sense of belonging and legitimacy. It reveals that prison visitation rooms present a complex environment in which incarcerated men have access to discreet periods of visibility and relevance to their family members and the broader community. There are, however, several precarious aspects to these processes. The family members who are central to enhancing men’s visibility and legitimacy are primarily women from economically disadvantaged, racial, and ethnic minority groups, resulting in their own marginalization, which is compounded within prison spaces. By illuminating both the challenges and opportunities of familial connections, this chapter informs a social justice framework for understanding the experiences of both incarcerated men and their family members.


Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document