Documents Journal of Law and Society 11 results

"On 17 March 2022, P&O Ferries summarily dismissed 786 seafarers without notice or consultation in a clear and openly admitted transgression of legality, but two months later its parent company's chief executive officer claimed that ‘nobody was hurt'. Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Alain Supiot, this article offers a critical account of the scandal based on three main arguments. First, it develops the new concept of an ‘authoritarian liquid transgression' (ALT), defined as a transgression of a democratic legal norm that seeks to leave no trace or excess (that which resists immediate liquefaction), thus aiming at complete erasure. Second, it argues that the P&O event is a paradigmatic example of an attempted ALT by dissecting three main steps in the business strategy (liquefaction, effacement, and simulation) but also traces competing privatized and politicized narratives of its excess. Third, the article suggests that the event will be viewed as a liminal event for the United Kingdom's authoritarian neoliberalism since it acted as a window that offered a brief glimpse of the brutal nature of authoritarian neoliberalism at work but also of an alternative solid construction of labour law and its remedial framework."

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

"Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's recent auto-critique invited legal consciousness scholars to develop their analyses of legal hegemony in the context of collective sites of legality construction and the contestation of the hegemony of state law. Trade unions provide a particularly apposite group and institutional site to study such processes. From a Marxist perspective, recent labour law scholarship has argued that union engagement with law reproduces liberal legal hegemony by depoliticizing domination and disciplining the individual and collective consciousness of workers and unions. First, we argue that critical legal consciousness research (cLCR) can nuance this Marxist perspective via its insights about polyvocality and legal pluralism. Second, we argue that cLCR relating to the relationship between counter-hegemonic projects and hegemony could be enriched by elements of the Marxist critique of labour law, albeit one that is committed to viewing theory as productive of hypotheses, rather than certainties, that should always be empirically investigated."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"here are numerous studies on the effectiveness of boards that primarily focus on legal formalities, including gender diversity, board size, remuneration, board evaluation, and the role of the chairman of the board. While attempting to design a one-size-fits-all framework, scholars approaching board independence from an agency-cost perspective have been less concerned with analysing board structures that contribute to strategic decision making and corporate performance. We examine the factors and board strategies that are associated with value creation and innovation by analysing the composition of high-performance and high-growth companies. The article shows that venture capitalists, with their specific expertise and experience, continue to play an important role as independent board members in the post-IPO period. We specifically investigate the importance of diversity, showing that there are significant differences between the companies in terms of age, gender diversity, and business expertise (which is dependent on the stage in the company life cycle)."

"In 2011, the European Commission launched a public consultation on ‘the European Corporate Governance framework', reflecting the EU's increasing concern about corporate governance issues, and the changes and reforms needed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The question raised is twofold: first, should new objectives be established, and secondly, which of the various regulatory mechanisms, the traditional unification/coordination tools or the more recent comply-or-explain rule, would best fulfill these objectives? The article discusses how the financial crisis has made the harmonization of corporate governance more imperative, why the objectives of corporate governance rules must be enlarged to preserve the interests of companies as a whole, and which mechanism would best achieve these changes. More specifically, it tackles the comply-or-explain rule already widespread in Europe, discussing its major advantages and flaws, as well as the efficiency of its control by national and European market authorities."

"The global financial crisis of 2008 has stimulated the debate on corporate governance and shareholder protection. The intuitive reason for the topicality of shareholder protection is that insolvencies mainly harm shareholders as the companies' residual claimants. In addition, ideally, shareholder empowerment may ensure better monitoring of management and therefore better-run companies preventing corporate failures and benefiting the economy as a whole. Yet, it is not self-evident that shareholder participation has such a positive effect. This article critically examines the discussion about the relationship between the financial crisis, shareholder protection, and law reform. We also develop a central position: while there may be a need to improve shareholder protection, we do not take the view that any increase in shareholder rights is the right way forward; rather, such reforms should aim to encourage shareholder engagement by responsible long-term investors."

"Much contemporary analysis has concluded that the recent financial crisis and bank failures were, among other things, the result of a breakdown in corporate governance regimes and market discipline. In this context, new regulations advocate such market-based remedies as tighter investor monitoring and greater control over executives' remuneration, in order to safeguard financial stability. We argue that this approach largely ignores three very important aspects of modern financial markets that cannot be constrained through market discipline: (i) socio-psychological phenomena; (ii) the epistemological properties of financial market innovation; and (iii) the inherent inability of market participants to predict uncertain risk correlations. Therefore, this article argues that excessive EU focus on corporate governance reforms as a means to improve financial stability detracts attention from much more significant concerns, chiefly, the issue of optimal bank structure."

"This article offers a critical appraisal of the way in which executive pay in financial institutions is regulated in the European Union. Despite the widely acknowledged role of executive pay in causing the financial crisis, regulators and policy makers were reluctant to intervene because of the ideology of shareholder primacy and an unjustified belief that this was a matter for companies and their shareholders alone. As a result, the original regulatory scheme which was introduced was very weak. The European Parliament responded to these developments by capping executive pay. The article argues that, while this cap is a crude instrument, it can be justified on economic grounds because it considerably reduces the likelihood of a future financial crisis, with all the social costs that would entail. If it also results in much higher fixed pay, that is a matter of concern for shareholders alone, and might even force them into the activism so long expected of them."

"This article attempts to explain how corporate governance and macro- economic policies have impacted on the role of workers and their representatives in the corporate environment and to consider how this has affected their capacity to protect themselves in the context of the financial crisis. It also considers the strategies they might adopt to strengthen their position in the future. It argues for the need to reposition labour law in the legal hierarchy as a first condition but also, and more importantly, that for democratic reasons, trade unions need to work collectively with other civil society and protest move- ments to hold corporations, national governments, and European institutions to account and, internally, to develop the class consciousness of old and new members. "

"This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757395). We are grateful to Aude Cefaliello and Rex Pannemann for research assistance and to the following for constructive comments and criticisms: Chris Hann, Miriam Glucksmann, Mark Harvey, Marie‐Claire Foblets, Alan Bogg, Marija Bartl, Candida Leone, Michel Coutu, Supriya Routh, Alessio Bertolini, Gregoris Ioannou, Eleanor Kirk, and Ou Lin. We thank Fred Block for posing the question of a labour constitution from below."