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Social & Legal Studies
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Private Legal Orders: Professional Markets and the Commodification of Financial Governance

James W. Williams

York University, Canada

Notwithstanding recent paradigmatic shifts from regulation as a state function to governance as an emergent property of interorganizational networks, conceptions of economic ordering in socio-legal studies remain rather short-sighted. In part, this theoretical myopia stems from a tendency to conceive of economic ordering in terms of a normative project cast at a macro level of analysis and rooted in the activities of formal institutions and state bodies. What has been overlooked in these accounts is the role played by professional groups in the enactment and legitimation of localized modes of economic ordering. This article seeks to remedy this oversight through an analysis of one particular form of professional labour that has emerged as a key factor in the arbitration of economic disputes and the management of corporate disorder: the forensic accounting and corporate investigation (FACI) industry. By defining this industry in terms of a market in professional services and then exploring the contributions of this market to the production of ‘private legal orders’, this analysis sets the stage for a more sophisticated view of economic ordering in capitalist market economies, one which is rooted in the knowledge work of professionals labouring on the margins of law, politics, and business.

Key Words: economic crime • financial governance • forensic accounting • private legal orders • professional markets • professionalization of law

Social & Legal Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, 209-235 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906063575
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