In 1983 Richard Hall viewed the sociological study of the professions as near death. However, had Hall examined the recent British literature he would have come to a very different conclusion. Our survey shows that this is a very active area of research and theorizing and that there are important lessons in it for American students of the professions. First, unlike the American literature, work in Britain has not been dominated by fruitless efforts to find the characteristics that differentiate professions from other occupations. Second, the British literature contains four distinctive characteristics that differentiate it from the American literature. They are a focus on inter- and intraprofessional conflicts, the relationship between the professions and the polity, the link between the professions and social stratification, and theoretical roots in the classic ideas of observers such as Marx and Weber. Third, the realities examined in the British literature lead us to conclude that the professions will ...

The Sociology of the Professions Dead or Alive

This article unpacks the notion of institutional complexity and highlights the distinct sets of challenges confronting hybrid structural arrangements. The framework identifies three factors that contribute to the experience of complexity—namely, the extent to which the prescriptive demands of logics are incompatible, whether there is a settled or widely accepted prioritization of logics within the field, and the degree to which the jurisdictions of the logics overlap. The central thesis is that these “components” of complexity variously combine to produce four distinct institutional landscapes, each with differing implications for the challenges organizations face and for how they might respond. The article explores the situational relevance of an array of hybridizing responses and discusses their implications for organizational legitimacy and performance. It concludes by specifying the boundary conditions of the framework and highlighting fruitful directions for future scholarship.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1476127016634639

Deconstructing Complexity: Configurations of Institutional Complexity and Structural Hybridity

The dissertation explores the politics of jurisdiction in international law. In order to do so, it reconstructs jurisdictional projects pursued by scholars and experts particularly in the context of ‘humanity’s law’. The thesis concentrates on (legal) technicalities and argues for the importance to ‘open black boxes’ such as interdisciplinarity, expertise – or jurisdiction. In a first part, it primarily focuses on the (inter)disciplinary dimension of studying the politics of international law by mapping different interdisciplinary projects between International Relations and International Law, and highlighting core topics among critical scholars in both disciplines. In a second part, the dissertation moves then to analyse the concept of jurisdiction in world politics. It situates discussions about jurisdiction within the discourse on the politics of international legal expertise and argues, by means of problematization and historical inquiry, to leave the common notion of jurisdiction in international law (as exclusive and territorial) behind and instead to grasp jurisdiction as non-territorial, post-Cartesian, multidimensional and non-exclusive. This becomes particularly visible in the context of ‘humanity’s law’. Therefore, the dissertation ends with two explorations into the politics of jurisdiction in ‘humanity’s law’: first, it analyses the politics of crimes in international criminal law and how by means of widening the scope of international crimes international legal experts attempt to augment this strand of ‘humanity’s law’; second, it explores how in the broader discourse on humanitarian intervention within and around the United Nations jurisdictional projects expand, through risk-based forms of governance, through time.

From territoriality to universality?: jurisdiction, expertise and the politics of humanity in International Law

The concept of the legal complex is a new addition to the lexicon of sociology and sociolegal scholarship. As a concept, the legal complex emerged from a series of interdisciplinary collaborations and primary research on the politics of lawyers and judges across the world. The review introduces this new collective actor to the political stage and elaborates its defining elements, morphology, varieties of mobilization, and repertoires of action. This review argues for a complementary methodological strategy for investigation of the politics of the legal complex, the longue duree and evenements. With respect to political liberalism, it shows the contexts and resources in which the legal complex thrives, with particular emphasis on civil society, information technology, the rise of constitutionalism, and international circumstances. The essay argues, however, that the explanatory reach of this concept can extend to any policymaking issues, national or supranational, that involve law, legal institutions, and ...

The Legal Complex

This article proposes a processual theory of the legal profession. In contrast to the structural, interactional, and collective action approaches, this processual theory conceptualizes the legal profession as a social process that changes over space and time. The social process of the legal profession includes four components: (1) diagnostic struggles over professional expertise; (2) boundary work over professional jurisdictions; (3) migration across geographical areas and status hierarchies; and (4) exchange between professions, and the state. Building on the processual theory and using China as a primary example, the author proposes a research agenda for studying lawyers and globalization that seeks to shift the focus of research from the legal elite to ordinary law practitioners, from global law firms to local law firms, and from advanced economies to emerging economies.

The Legal Profession as a Social Process: A Theory on Lawyers and Globalization

This paper sketches a new theoretical approach to the study of professions and uses that approach to analyze differences that have emerged between the American and English legal professions since the late nineteenth century. Earlier studies have generally emphasized professional structure and organization while ignoring work and its control. I argue that control of work is central to professional development. Since work is central and since professions compete for it, interprofessional competition is the determining fact in the history of professions. This paper analyzes the work available to the legal profession, the numbers and types of legal personnel available to do that work, and the various competitors contesting it. Studying in detail complaints of unqualified practice in England (1870–1940) and two American states (1910–50), I locate the types of contested work and the competitors involved, using these to explain important aspects of the two legal prof essions today. Throughout, a variety of theoretical concepts are developed and applied to the particular case. One striking discovery is the contrast in competitors; American lawyers' chief competitors were corporations, while British lawyers' chief competitor was the state. I close by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the particular methodology here used—the study of conflicts—and suggest alternative methods using the same theoretical framework.

Andrew Abbott

Papers

Jurisdictional Conflicts: A New Approach to the Development of the Legal Professions