Facilitating transfers: regulatory governance frameworks as ‘rites of passage’

ABSTRACT

Departing from the paradox that globalisation has implied an increase, rather than a decrease, in contextual diversity, this paper re-assesses the function, normative purpose and location of Regulatory Governance Frameworks in world society. Drawing on insights from sociology of law and world society studies, the argument advanced is that Regulatory Governance Frameworks are oriented towards facilitating transfers of condensed social components, such as economic capital and products, legal acts, political decisions and scientific knowledge, from one legally-constituted normative order, i.e. contextual setting, to another. Against this background, it is suggested that Regulatory Governance Frameworks can be understood as schemes which act as ‘rites of passage’ aimed at providing legal stabilisation to social processes characterised by liminality, i.e ambiguity, hybridity and in-betweenness.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalisation
• regulatory governance
• transfer
• global law
• world society
• rites of passage

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for very useful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Poul F. Kjaer is Professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

ORCID

Poul F. Kjaer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8027-3601

Notes

1 For the distinction between world society and world community, see Herborth and Kessler (2016).

2 For relevant empirical studies following a long a similar line, see, however, (Backer, 2007; Ponte & Sturgeon, 2014) and the other contributions to this special issue.

3 For a detailed account on this see (Kjaer, 2014).

4 The category of territorial differentiation used here differs from the categories deployed by Niklas Luhmann.

5 http://www.uia.org/yearbook. See, also, (Kjaer, 2014).

6 On the implications of repetitions and reiterations on social processes, see (Kjaer, 2006).

7 See the contribution of Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt to this special issue.

8 For more on this, see the contributions of Andre Nollkaemper and Antje Vetterlein in this special issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council [grant number ITEPE-312331].