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Private justice: towards integrated theorising in the sociology of law

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London; Routledge and Kegan Paul; 1983Description: 245 pISBN:
  • 710097034
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 340.11 HEN
Summary: This book looks at discipline in industry and shows how private justice is integrally bound up with formal law. It is a timely examination of the forms of social control that exist ostensibly outside the formal legal system but on which it crucially depends. Stuart Henry explores the sensitive area of private disciplinary procedures that operate in organisations ranging from private capitalist companies to alternative worker co-operatives. Drawing on survey data and on interviews with managers, unions and employees, he demonstrates that, while disciplinary policies and practice are shaped in part by the structure in which they occur, they also reflect the semi-autonomous nature of the individuals who participate in them and who enact the policy. Importantly, then, it emerges that there is an integral link between private justice and formal law. Private justice is penetrated directly by industrial relations legislation, the government's arbitration and conciliation service, and the legally constituted industrial tribunals, and indirectly by the implicit adoption of legal rhetoric, practices and personnel into its own forms. But formal law is also penetrated by private justice which imprints its own definitions of what counts as crime and who are to be taken as rule-breakers. Although aware of the power of the state to transcend local situations, Stuart Henry sees this power as ultimately limited by the semi-autonomous nature of those institutions on which it necessarily relies. Given the complexities of the relationships involved, Private Justice concludes that the idealistic attempts to intervene in the mutual interdependence between law and non-state forms of social control are more likely to be absorbed into the pre-existing relations than to bring a revolutionary change.
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This book looks at discipline in industry and shows how private justice is integrally bound up with formal law. It is a timely examination of the forms of social control that exist ostensibly outside the formal legal system but on which it crucially depends.
Stuart Henry explores the sensitive area of private disciplinary procedures that operate in organisations ranging from private capitalist companies to alternative worker co-operatives. Drawing on survey data and on interviews with managers, unions and employees, he demonstrates that, while disciplinary policies and practice are shaped in part by the structure in which they occur, they also reflect the semi-autonomous nature of the individuals who participate in them and who enact the policy. Importantly, then, it emerges that there is an integral link between private justice and formal law. Private justice is penetrated directly by industrial relations legislation, the government's arbitration and conciliation service, and the legally constituted industrial tribunals, and indirectly by the implicit adoption of legal rhetoric, practices and personnel into its own forms. But formal law is also penetrated by private justice which imprints its own definitions of what counts as crime and who are to be taken as rule-breakers.

Although aware of the power of the state to transcend local situations, Stuart Henry sees this power as ultimately limited by the semi-autonomous nature of those institutions on which it necessarily relies. Given the complexities of the relationships involved, Private Justice concludes that the idealistic attempts to intervene in the mutual interdependence between law and non-state forms of social control are more likely to be absorbed into the pre-existing relations than to bring a revolutionary change.

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