Introduction: Reconceptualizing Regulation in the Era of Globalization
| Published date | 01 March 2002 |
| Date | 01 March 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00208 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 29, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2002
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 1–11
Introduction: Reconceptualizing Regulation in the Era of
Globalization
Sol Picciotto*
The concept of ‘regulation’ has become sufficiently ubiquitous in recent
years, that it may be helpful to begin this collection of papers with some
analysis of the term and its usage. At its most general level it refers to the
means by which any activity, person, organism or institution is guided to
behave in a regular fashion, or according to rule. In principle, reference may
be made to the regulation of any kind of social behaviour, which gives the
term a very wide scope indeed. However, it is more particularly used, as in
this collection, in relation to economic activity.
1
In the context of socio-legal
studies, the concept has two main advantages. First, it leaves a useful
ambiguity over the extent to which such regular behaviour is generated
internally or entails external intervention. Secondly, it embraces all kinds of
rules, not only formal state law.
RETHINKING REGULATION IN THE NETWORK SOCIETY
These two features of the concept of regulation go some way to explain its
increased use since the 1970s and in particular the enormous effort spent on
rethinking its role and forms. This period has witnessed a prolonged process
of social and economic restructuring of the relations between the ‘private’
sphere of economic activity, and the ‘public’ realm of politics and the state,
interacting with changes in the form and role of these spheres themselves.
These changes have been manifested in different ways across the world,
including the collapse of centralized, bureaucratic state-socialism in the
Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and Africa; the fundamental remodelling of
social-democratic welfare-states in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand; the extensive regulatory reforms in the United States of America;
1
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Lancaster University Law School, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1
4YN, England
1 At least as far back as Blackstone’s reference to the role of corporations as including
‘the advancement and regulation of manufactures and commerce’, Commentaries
(1979, facsimile of original Clarendon Press edition of 1765–69) vol. I, 459.
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