Ronen Shamir

The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality

Abstract This article explores emerging discursive formations concerning the relationship of business and morality. It suggests that contemporary tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and business enterprises in particular. The article invokes the concept of ‘responsibilization’ as means of accounting for the epistemological and practical consequences of such processes. Looking at the underlying ‘market rationality’ of governance, and critically examining the notion of ‘corporate social responsibility’, it concludes that the moralization of markets further sustains, rather than undermining, neo-liberal governmentalities and neo-liberal visions of civil society, citizenship and responsible social action.

Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime*

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans-border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders. The mobility regime is theorized as premised upon a pervasive “paradigm of suspicion” that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint for the organization of global risk-management strategies. The article draws on multiple examples, singling out some elementary forms of the mobility regime, emphasizing the sociological affinity between guarded borders on the one hand and gated communities on the other. In particular, the article aims at theorizing the translation of the paradigm of suspicion into actual technologies of social screening designed to police the mobility of those social elements that are deemed to belong to suspect social categories. Specifically, the article points at biosocial profiling as an increasingly dominant technology of intervention. Biosocial profiling, in turn, is theorized in juxtaposition to other modalities of power, namely, legal and disciplinary measures.

Landmark Cases and the Reproduction of Legitimacy: The Case of Israel's High Court of Justice

The image of courts as impartial and independent sources of authority is considered a prerequisite if they are to play a legitimining role. Yet many studies suggest that courts systematically support and uphold state-sponsored policies. I ask how courts can support dominant political interests and at the same time appear impartial. A solution is suggested by looking at highly plblicibdml judicial decisions by Israels High Court of Justice in which state policies concerning the Israeli occupied territories were overruled. Such cases, while rare, nevertheless reinforce the legitimacy of courts. Consequently, decisions that counter some governmental practices allow courts to confer legitimacy on other and sometimes similar governmental policies. Finally, I place the findings in a eomparative context and outline a possible explanation for the circumstances under which landmark decisions are reached.

Nation-building and colonialism: The case of Jewish lawyers in Palestine

Partha Chatterjee, tracing the trajectory of Indian nationalism under British imperialism, argues that bourgeois opposition to colonialism has always been ambiguous. There is a history of collaboration between the colonial state and the educated classes, he writes, `̀ sealed by the marriage of law and literacy’ ’ . However studies of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine rarely adopt this analytic perspective. For several reasons, social scienti® c studies of Zionism have hardly begun to consider the relationship between the Jewish middle classes and the British colonial state. One such reason has to do with the way the story of Zionism has been accounted for by both enthusiasts and critics. ZionismÐ namely Jewish nationalism and the Jewish colonisation of PalestineÐ is typically accounted for in terms of a struggle: Zionists taking their destiny into their own hands and achieving independence by means of a successful struggle against both the Palestinian Arabs and the British colonisers. Positing the Zionists settlers as those who wrote their history with their own hands also entailed the marginalisation of the role played by the British in facilitating the process. The idea that it was with and through the existence of a fully functioning British colonial-style regime that the Zionist project advanced has been largely pushed to the margins of research. Another reason for the paradigmatic inability to consider the relationship between the Jewish middle classes and the British colonial state has to do with the status of the former in Zionist ideology. The dominant Zionist ideology degraded or simply ignored the role and importance of the middle-class city-dweller as far as nation building was concerned. Rather, it was the organised labourer, and in particular the pioneering rural coloniser of the frontier, who enjoyed the status of standing at the vanguard of the nation-building project. Consequently, Zionist historiographyÐ following on the heels of Zionist ideology, even if from a critical standpointÐ has mainly focused on the institutions of the Jewish labour movement

Formal and Substantive Rationality in American Law: a Weberian Perspective

N THIS essay I interpret the rise of American legal realism with a Weberian perspective in mind. The conclusion of this exercise, which I intend to clarify in the course of this article, is that (a) Weber’s conceptual treatment of law in capitalist society provides useful analytic tools for understanding the transformations of American law, although (b), Weber’s general theory of a progressive evolution of law in the direction of a formally-rational system is too narrowly conditioned by the particular legal-political reality that existed in turn-of-thecentury Germany. I show that Weber’s concepts of formallyand substantively-rational law and his analysis of the tension between the two provide an analytic framework for studying the political conditions that facilitate the rise and decline of given legal orders. Also, I show that Weber’s analysis of the relationship between legal modes of thought and the internal organization of the legal profession (that is, the relationship between law and its carriers) leads to an analytic orientation which reads legal history not only as a struggle of ideas but also as a struggle among segments of the legal profession in search for influence and power. Applied to the case of American legal realism, I develop four specific °’

Professionalism and monopoly of expertise: Lawyers and administrative law, 1933-1937

This study situates the response of various segments of the bar to the New Deal era of administrative expansion in the context of contemporary theories of the legal profession. The A. focuses on the theoritical formulations of a market monopoly approach, a functionalist approach, and a systems approach to the study of professionalism and professional competition ; and draws attention to the strategic mechanisms that lawyers invoked in order to deal with the inter- and intraprofessional competition that accompanied the expansion of the regulatory state.

Preventicum: The osmotic space of health

Ethnographic observations at an early-detection centre for cancer serve as a basis for theorising the spatiality of preventive medicine. Based on insights from both the sociology of health and the sociology of space, the article outlines a re-spatialisation of health by articulating the concept of osmotic-spatiality: spatial-temporal arrangements which transform health into a personal task and an individual achievement, producing the subjectivity of ‘healthy patients’.