Legal infrastructures: How laws matter in the organization of new markets

Abstract

Research into the creation of markets highlights the importance of law-making, seen to express relations between stakeholders in emerging organizational fields. Less understood is the role of existing regulation, despite related work on path-dependency. We unpack the role of extant laws by analysing consecutive attempts to establish the mortgage market in post-socialist Hungary, mobilizing the anthropology of law and actor-network methods. Based on interviews and archival documents, we find, first, that existing laws exert agency in the market-building process not only through abstract legal ‘traditions’ but through technical features which may resist the market arrangements proposed by political-economic coalitions. Second, the resistance of law can vary based on whether its spokespersons (guardians of legal consistency) become ‘market engineers’ under specific organizational configurations. We theorize this agency with the concept of ‘legal infrastructure’, and show how it acts as a non-human organizer of markets, ensuring compatibility across the economy.

The Double Darkness of Digitalization: Shaping Digital-ready Legislation to Reshape the Conditions for Public-sector Digitalization

“…By paying attention to policy tools and legislation, our study has shown mundane processes that reshape the conditions for digitalization in a current public-sector context. In this way, the article makes an empirical contribution to the burgeoning literature, which focuses on the importance of law in organizations (Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha 2021). Second, using the double darkness as an analytical lens on digital-ready legislation leads us to rethink the problem of digitalization differently than other contributions on the dark sides of digitalization (e.g., Zuboff 2019; O’Neil 2017).…”

“…However, as pointed out by scholars who have studied seemingly mundane, highly technical, and presumably boring details of, for example, auditing (Power 1999), administrative law (Latour 2010), or waste management (Woolgar and Neyland 2013), such practices are powerful partly because they are perceived as merely technical and boring. They are powerful because they are elements in infrastructures that shape organizations in ways that have a significant influence on key organizational actors and mechanisms (Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha 2021). Often, unobtrusive and seemingly neutral policy tools play a major role in these shaping processes (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007).…”