April 24 2024 / Ethnographic Institute, Emlyon Business School.
Organizing committee
Guillaume Dumont, Emlyon Business School, France. Loïc Pignolo, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Theme
Legal and illegal economic activities are often considered separate social spheres and studied in isolation. However, recent studies have advocated for a more nuanced of how legality and illegality are interconected (Beckert & Dewey, 2017; Beckert & Wehinger, 2013; Mayntz, 2017). Ethnographic scholarship on law and illicit economies illustrates how the illegality of activities is constructed in relation to legal norms, and explores how illegal activities are intertwined with legal activities in their daily unfolding. Illegal economies, for instance, often build on available legal infrastructure (Columb, 2020; Feltran, 2022). Moreover, people engaged in illegal activities interact with “official guardians of legality” (Mayntz, 2017, p. 44), eventually leading to corruption (Dewey, 2020) and strategies of concealment (Steiner, 2017). Also, specific activities and practices across contexts can be viewed as meaningful and legitimate, despite their illegality (Contreras, 2012; Dewey, 2020; Rodgers, 2022). These works point to the importance of legitimacy and social legitimization when understanding the relationship between legality and illegality (Beckert and Dewey, 2017; Mayntz, 2017).