Regulation in images<\/h5>\n<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/allegralaboratory.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Figure-3-2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\nWhile in the Western European\/American context, regulation is\u00a0 the stuff of big companies, in Poland it is small companies, which form the bulk of the country\u2019s economy that are at the centre of regulatory talk. On the one hand, there is the figure of \u201cJanusz Biznesu<\/a>\u201d (\u201cJoseph, the businessman\u201d) \u2013 a small enterprise owner who constantly cuts corners to the dismay of his workers and customers \u2014 imagine poor quality food.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/allegralaboratory.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/4_Intro-reg.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\nOn the other, there are parties like \u201cStrajk Przedsiebiorc\u00f3w<\/a>\u201d (\u201cProtest of Entrepreneurs\u201d), representing small business owners, which oppose red tape and see it as stifling their ability to grow and compete. Source<\/a>. One of the common ways to think about regulation \u2014 especially in conservative circles \u2014 is as a hurdle to business and consumer liberties. This is encapsulated in this cartoon<\/a> from the conservative US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, which features alongside an article by Scott Lincicome, Vice President of staunchly conservative think tank CATO Institute, titled, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Workers Need Freedom, Not More Government<\/a>\u201d (December 2022). [Click link to see the image]. Elsewhere in Europe, economically liberal French daily, L\u2019Opinion<\/a><\/em>, mocks EU adherence to regulation, which creates a difficult atmosphere for arms trade and thus leads to dependence on foreign production of arms (i.e. regulation leads to outsourcing to less regulated places). This follows a common narrative about the EU and its regulatory power as reducing competitiveness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nRegulation is facing calamitous times. U.S. President Trump\u2019s recent re-election and the appointment of business tycoon Elon Musk as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, centrally concerned with slashing \u201cexcessive\u201d regulation, threaten to sound the death knell for many of the remaining regulatory safeguards that protect people against avoidable harm in a capitalist world that can seem out of control. Indeed, much regulation originated in disaster. Consider the dramatic change in offshore health and safety regulation that followed the Piper Alpha disaster<\/a> in the North Sea, which claimed the lives of 167 offshore workers in July 1988 when gas leaked from a faulty condensate pump, leading to several devastating explosions. A subsequent public enquiry and the resultant Cullen report brought a raft of recommendations for improved offshore regulation. Fossil companies operating offshore were now required to become wholly accountable for the integrity of their installations and work environments, and to prioritise safety over profit. Similarly wide-ranging regulatory reform happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis\u2014a crisis, many argue, that was itself the product of failed regulation.<\/p>\nBecause of regulation\u2019s ability to temper private interest and promote the public good, many anthropologists have been partial to more regulation rather than less. Anthropologists are known for their sustained critique of capitalism, unbridled extractivism, state capture, growing inequality, and market actors\u2019 (futile) attempts to turn vice into virtue (remember, \u201cGreed is good!\u201d) \u2013 that is, those features of capitalist development that seem to call for regulatory checks. Regulation, in this view, breaks down popular aspirations into tangible actions. It is implemented by designated government agencies, professional boards, and corporate departments charged with the work of molding and monitoring the conduct of others. But regulation alone does not always bring the desired results, and regulators can choose to be willfully ignorant (McGoey 2007). China, for example, responded to the Paris Climate Accord with aspirational policy pledges to reach peak CO2<\/sub> emissions before 2030, and peak coal consumption by 2025 (Climate Action Tracker<\/a>). However, this has not stopped the government from approving new coal-fired power plants. Or we can look to Scotland, which recently declared its climate targets to be simply \u201cout of reach<\/a>\u201d, showing how easy it is to undo regulatory aspirations.<\/p>\n\nClearly, a focus on headline policies and regulatory rulebooks can readily miss out on the diverse actualities of doing (and undoing) regulation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Situated within cultures of accountability (Strathern 2000), regulation may simply encourage theatres of virtue that grant harmful industries a continued \u201clicence to operate\u201d (Benson and Kirsch 2010). And while some regulation seeks to limit power and the pursuit of self-interest, it can also be conservative, aimed at maintaining the status quo<\/em> of growth-based capitalism. The difficult balancing act\u2014where regulatory actors negotiate between private interest and shifting conceptions of the public good\u2014is reflected in criticisms of regulation \u201cgone too far\u201d and \u201cstifling business\u201d (see figure 5). Regulatory overload can put well-resourced multinationals at an advantage and drive small and medium enterprises out of business. Clearly, a focus on headline policies and regulatory rulebooks can readily miss out on the diverse actualities of doing (and undoing) regulation.<\/p>\n\nSharon Murdoch\u2019s 2020 cartoon<\/a>, \u2018Freshwater Flip-Flop\u2019, features a fish struggling to breath as it rests on rocks amidst receding water, lampooning the push-pull between creating and then dismantling strong freshwater regulations in New Zealand. [Click on link to see the image].<\/p>\n<\/div>\nOther anthropologists, however, have been more circumspect of regulatory rule not least because of its complicity with state power, and its tendency to collapse categories of difference and push toward uniformity. Without a doubt, regulation can help build trust in contexts characterized by opacity, misinformation, and unpredictable risk (Weichselbraun et al. 2023) as well as bolster public legitimacy, achieve collective goods, and furnish hopeful imaginations of the future (Bear and Mathur, 2015). However, state-led definitions of the public good (Brown et al. 2021) can be experienced as partial, contentious, or even repressive attempts to shape the world. They frequently work against cultural difference, disregard subaltern struggles, and reproduce colonial and broader secular and normative forms of scrutiny, standardization, and control. As a mode of state governance, regulation can seem benign\u2014\u201cguiding\u201d, \u201csteering\u201d, or \u201cnudging\u201d people to do better or act predictably. Yet, it often interlocks with violent, racialized, gendered, and class-based forms of power (Browne 2015).<\/p>\n
\nRegulation is done\u2014and undone\u2014as much within government agencies as within corporations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Importantly, though constitutive of the spectacle that calls the state into being, regulation is no longer a state prerogative. Rather, as the contributions to this thematic thread show, it now involves a variety of business and international governmental agencies, operating as if unbounded by territorial imaginaries. Regulation is done\u2014and undone\u2014as much within government agencies as within corporations. Its logics and procedures implode the conceptual and practical boundaries between state, market, and technoscientific expertise. Regulation\u2019s frequent appeals to science, rather than suggesting a necessary or singularly suitable course of action, may be used to hide arbitrariness and bias (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999; Brice et al., 2022). It operationalizes standards and limits that\u2014deliberately or implicitly\u2014tolerate pervasive environmental destruction and exploitation at the expense of those most marginalized (Liboiron 2021). It can perpetuate dominant forms of power in other ways, too, for example by encouraging forms of private ownership in the name of achieving ostensible goods, such as nature conservation, while discounting established local lifeways (Finney 2014), or by suppressing certain urban livelihoods to further the interests of the wealthy (Roy, 2005; Tucker and Anantharaman, 2020).<\/p>\n
The contributions to this thematic thread stay with these ambivalences to understand regulation\u2019s power to bring significant change, but also\u00a0its tendency to reproduce the status quo and potentially narrow notions of the public good. They suggest new possibilities for ethnographically-driven inquiry into what some deem a historical moment of \u201cregulatory capitalism\u201d (Brathwaite 2008), framed by the problematic corporate internalization of supposedly (self)regulatory functions (Benson and Kirsch 2010; Baldwin et al. 2011), by the uneven translation and borrowing of regulatory forms across national, linguistic, and cultural borders (T\u00fcrem and Ballestero 2014), and by an uneasy entanglement of state, corporate, religious, moral and technoscientific modes of epistemic power (Bond 2022)\u2014each presenting different affordances. The papers also explore regulation beyond those prominent corporate and institutional worlds and show how it reaches into the most intimate domains of professional ethos, reproduction, family and health.<\/p>\n
In this perspective, there is not just one regulatory modus operandi<\/em>, and regulation is not simply an execution of rule. The accounts gathered here show how bureaucratic processes can shape individual and collective lives down to the most intimate detail and in unpredictable ways. They also point to the important role of forms of discretion (du Gay and Pedersen 2020), anti-strategy (McGoey 2007), mediation, and differentiation that regulatory practice entails. Those doing the regulating\u2014just like those being regulated\u2014bring their own beliefs, aspirations, utopias and desires to the task (Billaud and Cowan, 2020), and occasionally find them thwarted.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/allegralaboratory.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Figure-6_Legally-Blonde.gif\")
<\/figure>\n\nThis gif<\/a> recycles a scene from the 2001 romantic comedy Legally Blonde<\/em>, where Elle Woods, epitome of white, upper class, female American aspiration, celebrates with her sorority sisters, and repurposes the tableau to engage with two mainstays of regulatory\/cultural debate in the contemporary US: abortion rights (laws and regulations limiting access to medical interventions) and gun control (laws and regulations that mandate broad-reaching rights to own and bear arms).<\/p>\n<\/div>\nIn short, regulation is no longer a boring topic for anthropologists (van Eijk 2018)\u2014if it ever was. The authors here step beyond institutional, discursive and legalistic approaches prevalent in much regulation research. They explore how regulation gathers a variety of actors, including not just state regulators, tasked with its implementation, but also corporate administrators and consultants ensuring adherence to the rules, and a host of mediators operating within an ever-increasing regulatory industry.<\/p>\n
\nOne prominent theme in this thematic thread is the antithetical trends toward deregulation and re-regulation, and their diverse effects.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
One prominent theme in this thematic thread is the antithetical trends toward deregulation and re-regulation, and their diverse effects. Sandy Smith-Nonini<\/a><\/strong> examines how recent, extreme winter weather events in the US have heightened scrutiny of deregulated electric utilities built around futures markets. Despite promises of lower rates and sustainable power, deregulated systems have increased both economic and social risks during high-demand periods due to gas price manipulation and other vulnerabilities in the supply systems.<\/p>\nBy contrast, Caura Wood<\/a><\/strong> draws on her work as an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability practitioner in Alberta\u2019s oil patch to track the expanding inventory of regulatory objects, which resulted from requirements to consider First Nations\u2019 Treaty 8 rights in the planning operations of oil and gas companies. Wood asks whether such newly created ethical spaces and efforts at what Mi\u2019Kmaw Elder, Albert Marshall, describes as \u2018two-eyed seeing\u2019 might allow for a joint healing of the land and, with this, greater energy justice and Indigenous reconciliation.<\/p>\nAmanda Kearney<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s contribution similarly attends to the shifting epistemic bases of regulatory practice and explores what it would mean to embrace uncertainty in the regulatory process. Drawing on applied research instructing expert regulators in cross-cultural ways of knowing the sea around Australia, Kearney argues that anthropological insight can help regulatory bodies with decision-making powers embrace a plurality of knowledges, especially on matters that affect cultural groups differently.<\/p>\nRegulations can have bodily and affective dimensions, including the promise of control and predictable outcomes, which can apply well beyond corporate self-image. Stephanie Postar<\/strong>\u2018s account of Tanzania\u2019s Atomic Energy Commission\u2019s social media shows how the regulator uses popular culture to instill trust in institutional operations. Regulatory power and procedures are heralded to the public by laudatory songs about the Commission. The songs render atomic energy as modern, well managed, and aligned with desired, common visions of the future, and eclipse their political contentiousness.<\/p>\nGustav Kalm<\/strong> explores how hospitable and attractive regulatory environments have become the holy grail of economic strategy in countries such as Guinea-Conakry. Ironically, perhaps, rather than leading to greater differentiation (or a marketing strategy focused on Unique Selling Points), the effect has been one of increasing homogenization, where countries vie for foreign investment with almost identical, empty slogans.<\/p>\nArthur Mason <\/strong>follows the work routines of oil and gas data analysts who repackage corporate information through proprietary algorithms for investor clients. He shows how the small movement of a chair in the analysts\u2019 office reflects an effort to achieve a sense of aesthetic legibility for the data. This involves disaggregating what analysts consider \u201cclient-interest information\u201d from the regulatory framing of assets\u2014that is, a filtering out of regulatory information. The movement of a chair thus tells a bigger story about dependencies of regulation and economics in the context of oil and gas trading.<\/p>\nThe contributions by Rams, Perkins and Bolt zoom in on the apparent gaps that open between regulatory aspirations and practice. Dagna Rams<\/strong> explores the implementation of new regulation, specifically an EU Corporate Sustainability Directive (CSRD) aimed at addressing regulatory arbitrage\u2014that is, corporate avoidance strategies that tend to exacerbate global inequalities through the outsourcing of harm. New regulation, however, is met with ambivalence in corporate cultures where fresh demands for demonstrating so-called intangibles such as \u201creputation\u201d and \u201ctransparency\u201d place an increased burden on under-resourced and over-worked sustainability and compliance officers.<\/p>\nJanet Perkins <\/strong>reveals how government efforts to regulate private maternal health care in Bangladesh centre on moral claims and on a tenuous state\/economy divide. Although regulation aspires to standardize these services across providers, its regional implementation is determined by existing political networks of patronage rather than compliance. As a result, regulation hides the creative work that make maternal health technologies work in practice and fails to generate the desired health outcomes.<\/p>\nLast but not least, Max Bolt<\/strong> examines the fractured promise of legal access and equality in post-apartheid South Africa through the lens of property inheritance and its associated legal-administrative system. In this context, the figure of the executor, acting in a fiduciary role to protect the interests of others, becomes pivotal, embodying the fractures and constraints of an under-resourced administrative system and its (failed) regulatory aspirations.<\/p>\n
\nFeatured image: Regulation Undone, created using Chat GPT<\/em>.<\/p>\nReferences<\/h5>\n
Baldwin, R., Cave, M., and Lodge, M. 2011. Understanding regulation: Theory, strategy, and practice<\/em>. Oxford University Press: Oxford.\u00a0<\/p>\nBear, L. and N. Mathur 2015. \u201cIntroduction \u2013 Remaking the public good: A new anthropology of bureaucracy\u201d. In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology<\/em> 33(1): 18\u201334.<\/p>\nBenson, P. and S. Kirsch 2010. \u201cCapitalism and the Politics of Resignation<\/a>\u201c. In:\u00a0Current Anthropology<\/em>\u00a051(4): 459\u2013486.<\/p>\nBillaud, J. and J.K. Cowan. 2020. \u201cThe bureaucratisation of utopia: ethics, affects and subjectivities in international governance processes\u201d. In: Social Anthropology<\/em> 28(1): 6\u201316.<\/p>\nBiruk, C. 2023. \u201cWhen partners are suspect(s): Trust, transparency, and racialised suspicion in global health infrastructures\u201d. In: Cambridge Journal of Anthropology<\/em> 41(2): 51\u201370.<\/p>\nBond, D. 2022. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment<\/em>. University of California Press: Oakland, CA.<\/p>\nBowker, G.C. and S. Leigh Star 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. <\/em>MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.<\/p>\nBraithwaite, J. 2008. Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making it Work Better. <\/em>Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK.<\/p>\nBrice, J., Cusworth, G., Lorimer, J., and T. Garnett 2022. \u201cImmaterial animals and financialized forests: Asset manager capitalism, ESG integration and the politics of livestock\u201d. In: Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space<\/em> 54(8): 1551\u20131568.<\/p>\nBrown, P. R., Cherney, L., and S. Warner 2021. \u201cUnderstanding Public Value\u2013Why Does It Matter?\u201d. In: International Journal of Public Administration<\/em> 44(10): 803\u20137.<\/p>\nBrowne, S. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness<\/em>. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.<\/p>\nCromer,\u00a0R., and\u00a0S. Bjork-James.\u00a02023. \u201cDeploying fetal death: \u201cFetal burial\u201d laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana\u201d. In:\u00a0PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review,<\/em>\u00a046:\u00a09\u201323.<\/p>\ndu Gay, P. and K.Z. Pedersen 2020. \u201cDiscretion and Bureaucracy\u201d. In: Evans, T., Hupe, P. (eds). Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.<\/p>\nFinney, C. 2014. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. <\/em>University of North Carolina Press.<\/p>\nLiboiron, M. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism<\/em>. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.<\/p>\nMcGoey, L. 2007. \u201cOn the will to ignorance in bureaucracy\u201d. In: Economy and Society<\/em> 36(2): 212\u2013235.<\/p>\nRoy, A. 2005. \u201cUrban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning\u201d. In: Journal of the American Planning Association<\/em> 71(2): 147\u2013158.<\/p>\nStrathern, M. 2000. \u201cNew Accountabilities; Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy\u201d. In: Strathern, M. (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy<\/em>. Routledge: London and New York: 1\u201318.<\/p>\nTucker, J.L., and M. Anantharaman 2020. \u201cInformal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation\u201d. In: One Earth<\/em> (Cambridge, Mass.) 3: 290\u2013299.<\/p>\nT\u00fcrem, Z.U. and A. Ballestero 2014. \u201cRegulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields\u201d. In: Indiana Journal of Global and Legal Studies<\/em> 21(1): 1\u201325.<\/p>\nvan Eijk, M. 2018. \u201cThe Anthropology of \u201cBoring\u201d Things<\/a>\u201c. In: Medical Anthropology Quarterly<\/em> Second Spear Blog Series. Accessed August 7, 2024.<\/p>\n
<\/figure>\nWhile in the Western European\/American context, regulation is\u00a0 the stuff of big companies, in Poland it is small companies, which form the bulk of the country\u2019s economy that are at the centre of regulatory talk. On the one hand, there is the figure of \u201cJanusz Biznesu<\/a>\u201d (\u201cJoseph, the businessman\u201d) \u2013 a small enterprise owner who constantly cuts corners to the dismay of his workers and customers \u2014 imagine poor quality food.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On the other, there are parties like \u201cStrajk Przedsiebiorc\u00f3w<\/a>\u201d (\u201cProtest of Entrepreneurs\u201d), representing small business owners, which oppose red tape and see it as stifling their ability to grow and compete. Source<\/a>. One of the common ways to think about regulation \u2014 especially in conservative circles \u2014 is as a hurdle to business and consumer liberties. This is encapsulated in this cartoon<\/a> from the conservative US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, which features alongside an article by Scott Lincicome, Vice President of staunchly conservative think tank CATO Institute, titled, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Workers Need Freedom, Not More Government<\/a>\u201d (December 2022). [Click link to see the image]. Elsewhere in Europe, economically liberal French daily, L\u2019Opinion<\/a><\/em>, mocks EU adherence to regulation, which creates a difficult atmosphere for arms trade and thus leads to dependence on foreign production of arms (i.e. regulation leads to outsourcing to less regulated places). This follows a common narrative about the EU and its regulatory power as reducing competitiveness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Regulation is facing calamitous times. U.S. President Trump\u2019s recent re-election and the appointment of business tycoon Elon Musk as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, centrally concerned with slashing \u201cexcessive\u201d regulation, threaten to sound the death knell for many of the remaining regulatory safeguards that protect people against avoidable harm in a capitalist world that can seem out of control. Indeed, much regulation originated in disaster. Consider the dramatic change in offshore health and safety regulation that followed the Piper Alpha disaster<\/a> in the North Sea, which claimed the lives of 167 offshore workers in July 1988 when gas leaked from a faulty condensate pump, leading to several devastating explosions. A subsequent public enquiry and the resultant Cullen report brought a raft of recommendations for improved offshore regulation. Fossil companies operating offshore were now required to become wholly accountable for the integrity of their installations and work environments, and to prioritise safety over profit. Similarly wide-ranging regulatory reform happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis\u2014a crisis, many argue, that was itself the product of failed regulation.<\/p>\n Because of regulation\u2019s ability to temper private interest and promote the public good, many anthropologists have been partial to more regulation rather than less. Anthropologists are known for their sustained critique of capitalism, unbridled extractivism, state capture, growing inequality, and market actors\u2019 (futile) attempts to turn vice into virtue (remember, \u201cGreed is good!\u201d) \u2013 that is, those features of capitalist development that seem to call for regulatory checks. Regulation, in this view, breaks down popular aspirations into tangible actions. It is implemented by designated government agencies, professional boards, and corporate departments charged with the work of molding and monitoring the conduct of others. But regulation alone does not always bring the desired results, and regulators can choose to be willfully ignorant (McGoey 2007). China, for example, responded to the Paris Climate Accord with aspirational policy pledges to reach peak CO2<\/sub> emissions before 2030, and peak coal consumption by 2025 (Climate Action Tracker<\/a>). However, this has not stopped the government from approving new coal-fired power plants. Or we can look to Scotland, which recently declared its climate targets to be simply \u201cout of reach<\/a>\u201d, showing how easy it is to undo regulatory aspirations.<\/p>\n Clearly, a focus on headline policies and regulatory rulebooks can readily miss out on the diverse actualities of doing (and undoing) regulation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Situated within cultures of accountability (Strathern 2000), regulation may simply encourage theatres of virtue that grant harmful industries a continued \u201clicence to operate\u201d (Benson and Kirsch 2010). And while some regulation seeks to limit power and the pursuit of self-interest, it can also be conservative, aimed at maintaining the status quo<\/em> of growth-based capitalism. The difficult balancing act\u2014where regulatory actors negotiate between private interest and shifting conceptions of the public good\u2014is reflected in criticisms of regulation \u201cgone too far\u201d and \u201cstifling business\u201d (see figure 5). Regulatory overload can put well-resourced multinationals at an advantage and drive small and medium enterprises out of business. Clearly, a focus on headline policies and regulatory rulebooks can readily miss out on the diverse actualities of doing (and undoing) regulation.<\/p>\n Sharon Murdoch\u2019s 2020 cartoon<\/a>, \u2018Freshwater Flip-Flop\u2019, features a fish struggling to breath as it rests on rocks amidst receding water, lampooning the push-pull between creating and then dismantling strong freshwater regulations in New Zealand. [Click on link to see the image].<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Other anthropologists, however, have been more circumspect of regulatory rule not least because of its complicity with state power, and its tendency to collapse categories of difference and push toward uniformity. Without a doubt, regulation can help build trust in contexts characterized by opacity, misinformation, and unpredictable risk (Weichselbraun et al. 2023) as well as bolster public legitimacy, achieve collective goods, and furnish hopeful imaginations of the future (Bear and Mathur, 2015). However, state-led definitions of the public good (Brown et al. 2021) can be experienced as partial, contentious, or even repressive attempts to shape the world. They frequently work against cultural difference, disregard subaltern struggles, and reproduce colonial and broader secular and normative forms of scrutiny, standardization, and control. As a mode of state governance, regulation can seem benign\u2014\u201cguiding\u201d, \u201csteering\u201d, or \u201cnudging\u201d people to do better or act predictably. Yet, it often interlocks with violent, racialized, gendered, and class-based forms of power (Browne 2015).<\/p>\n Regulation is done\u2014and undone\u2014as much within government agencies as within corporations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Importantly, though constitutive of the spectacle that calls the state into being, regulation is no longer a state prerogative. Rather, as the contributions to this thematic thread show, it now involves a variety of business and international governmental agencies, operating as if unbounded by territorial imaginaries. Regulation is done\u2014and undone\u2014as much within government agencies as within corporations. Its logics and procedures implode the conceptual and practical boundaries between state, market, and technoscientific expertise. Regulation\u2019s frequent appeals to science, rather than suggesting a necessary or singularly suitable course of action, may be used to hide arbitrariness and bias (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999; Brice et al., 2022). It operationalizes standards and limits that\u2014deliberately or implicitly\u2014tolerate pervasive environmental destruction and exploitation at the expense of those most marginalized (Liboiron 2021). It can perpetuate dominant forms of power in other ways, too, for example by encouraging forms of private ownership in the name of achieving ostensible goods, such as nature conservation, while discounting established local lifeways (Finney 2014), or by suppressing certain urban livelihoods to further the interests of the wealthy (Roy, 2005; Tucker and Anantharaman, 2020).<\/p>\n The contributions to this thematic thread stay with these ambivalences to understand regulation\u2019s power to bring significant change, but also\u00a0its tendency to reproduce the status quo and potentially narrow notions of the public good. They suggest new possibilities for ethnographically-driven inquiry into what some deem a historical moment of \u201cregulatory capitalism\u201d (Brathwaite 2008), framed by the problematic corporate internalization of supposedly (self)regulatory functions (Benson and Kirsch 2010; Baldwin et al. 2011), by the uneven translation and borrowing of regulatory forms across national, linguistic, and cultural borders (T\u00fcrem and Ballestero 2014), and by an uneasy entanglement of state, corporate, religious, moral and technoscientific modes of epistemic power (Bond 2022)\u2014each presenting different affordances. The papers also explore regulation beyond those prominent corporate and institutional worlds and show how it reaches into the most intimate domains of professional ethos, reproduction, family and health.<\/p>\n In this perspective, there is not just one regulatory modus operandi<\/em>, and regulation is not simply an execution of rule. The accounts gathered here show how bureaucratic processes can shape individual and collective lives down to the most intimate detail and in unpredictable ways. They also point to the important role of forms of discretion (du Gay and Pedersen 2020), anti-strategy (McGoey 2007), mediation, and differentiation that regulatory practice entails. Those doing the regulating\u2014just like those being regulated\u2014bring their own beliefs, aspirations, utopias and desires to the task (Billaud and Cowan, 2020), and occasionally find them thwarted.<\/p>\n This gif<\/a> recycles a scene from the 2001 romantic comedy Legally Blonde<\/em>, where Elle Woods, epitome of white, upper class, female American aspiration, celebrates with her sorority sisters, and repurposes the tableau to engage with two mainstays of regulatory\/cultural debate in the contemporary US: abortion rights (laws and regulations limiting access to medical interventions) and gun control (laws and regulations that mandate broad-reaching rights to own and bear arms).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In short, regulation is no longer a boring topic for anthropologists (van Eijk 2018)\u2014if it ever was. The authors here step beyond institutional, discursive and legalistic approaches prevalent in much regulation research. They explore how regulation gathers a variety of actors, including not just state regulators, tasked with its implementation, but also corporate administrators and consultants ensuring adherence to the rules, and a host of mediators operating within an ever-increasing regulatory industry.<\/p>\n One prominent theme in this thematic thread is the antithetical trends toward deregulation and re-regulation, and their diverse effects.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n One prominent theme in this thematic thread is the antithetical trends toward deregulation and re-regulation, and their diverse effects. Sandy Smith-Nonini<\/a><\/strong> examines how recent, extreme winter weather events in the US have heightened scrutiny of deregulated electric utilities built around futures markets. Despite promises of lower rates and sustainable power, deregulated systems have increased both economic and social risks during high-demand periods due to gas price manipulation and other vulnerabilities in the supply systems.<\/p>\n By contrast, Caura Wood<\/a><\/strong> draws on her work as an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability practitioner in Alberta\u2019s oil patch to track the expanding inventory of regulatory objects, which resulted from requirements to consider First Nations\u2019 Treaty 8 rights in the planning operations of oil and gas companies. Wood asks whether such newly created ethical spaces and efforts at what Mi\u2019Kmaw Elder, Albert Marshall, describes as \u2018two-eyed seeing\u2019 might allow for a joint healing of the land and, with this, greater energy justice and Indigenous reconciliation.<\/p>\n Amanda Kearney<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s contribution similarly attends to the shifting epistemic bases of regulatory practice and explores what it would mean to embrace uncertainty in the regulatory process. Drawing on applied research instructing expert regulators in cross-cultural ways of knowing the sea around Australia, Kearney argues that anthropological insight can help regulatory bodies with decision-making powers embrace a plurality of knowledges, especially on matters that affect cultural groups differently.<\/p>\n Regulations can have bodily and affective dimensions, including the promise of control and predictable outcomes, which can apply well beyond corporate self-image. Stephanie Postar<\/strong>\u2018s account of Tanzania\u2019s Atomic Energy Commission\u2019s social media shows how the regulator uses popular culture to instill trust in institutional operations. Regulatory power and procedures are heralded to the public by laudatory songs about the Commission. The songs render atomic energy as modern, well managed, and aligned with desired, common visions of the future, and eclipse their political contentiousness.<\/p>\n Gustav Kalm<\/strong> explores how hospitable and attractive regulatory environments have become the holy grail of economic strategy in countries such as Guinea-Conakry. Ironically, perhaps, rather than leading to greater differentiation (or a marketing strategy focused on Unique Selling Points), the effect has been one of increasing homogenization, where countries vie for foreign investment with almost identical, empty slogans.<\/p>\n Arthur Mason <\/strong>follows the work routines of oil and gas data analysts who repackage corporate information through proprietary algorithms for investor clients. He shows how the small movement of a chair in the analysts\u2019 office reflects an effort to achieve a sense of aesthetic legibility for the data. This involves disaggregating what analysts consider \u201cclient-interest information\u201d from the regulatory framing of assets\u2014that is, a filtering out of regulatory information. The movement of a chair thus tells a bigger story about dependencies of regulation and economics in the context of oil and gas trading.<\/p>\n The contributions by Rams, Perkins and Bolt zoom in on the apparent gaps that open between regulatory aspirations and practice. Dagna Rams<\/strong> explores the implementation of new regulation, specifically an EU Corporate Sustainability Directive (CSRD) aimed at addressing regulatory arbitrage\u2014that is, corporate avoidance strategies that tend to exacerbate global inequalities through the outsourcing of harm. New regulation, however, is met with ambivalence in corporate cultures where fresh demands for demonstrating so-called intangibles such as \u201creputation\u201d and \u201ctransparency\u201d place an increased burden on under-resourced and over-worked sustainability and compliance officers.<\/p>\n Janet Perkins <\/strong>reveals how government efforts to regulate private maternal health care in Bangladesh centre on moral claims and on a tenuous state\/economy divide. Although regulation aspires to standardize these services across providers, its regional implementation is determined by existing political networks of patronage rather than compliance. As a result, regulation hides the creative work that make maternal health technologies work in practice and fails to generate the desired health outcomes.<\/p>\n Last but not least, Max Bolt<\/strong> examines the fractured promise of legal access and equality in post-apartheid South Africa through the lens of property inheritance and its associated legal-administrative system. In this context, the figure of the executor, acting in a fiduciary role to protect the interests of others, becomes pivotal, embodying the fractures and constraints of an under-resourced administrative system and its (failed) regulatory aspirations.<\/p>\n Featured image: Regulation Undone, created using Chat GPT<\/em>.<\/p>\n Baldwin, R., Cave, M., and Lodge, M. 2011. Understanding regulation: Theory, strategy, and practice<\/em>. Oxford University Press: Oxford.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bear, L. and N. Mathur 2015. \u201cIntroduction \u2013 Remaking the public good: A new anthropology of bureaucracy\u201d. In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology<\/em> 33(1): 18\u201334.<\/p>\n Benson, P. and S. Kirsch 2010. \u201cCapitalism and the Politics of Resignation<\/a>\u201c. In:\u00a0Current Anthropology<\/em>\u00a051(4): 459\u2013486.<\/p>\n Billaud, J. and J.K. Cowan. 2020. \u201cThe bureaucratisation of utopia: ethics, affects and subjectivities in international governance processes\u201d. In: Social Anthropology<\/em> 28(1): 6\u201316.<\/p>\n Biruk, C. 2023. \u201cWhen partners are suspect(s): Trust, transparency, and racialised suspicion in global health infrastructures\u201d. In: Cambridge Journal of Anthropology<\/em> 41(2): 51\u201370.<\/p>\n Bond, D. 2022. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment<\/em>. University of California Press: Oakland, CA.<\/p>\n Bowker, G.C. and S. Leigh Star 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. <\/em>MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.<\/p>\n Braithwaite, J. 2008. Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making it Work Better. <\/em>Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK.<\/p>\n Brice, J., Cusworth, G., Lorimer, J., and T. Garnett 2022. \u201cImmaterial animals and financialized forests: Asset manager capitalism, ESG integration and the politics of livestock\u201d. In: Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space<\/em> 54(8): 1551\u20131568.<\/p>\n Brown, P. R., Cherney, L., and S. Warner 2021. \u201cUnderstanding Public Value\u2013Why Does It Matter?\u201d. In: International Journal of Public Administration<\/em> 44(10): 803\u20137.<\/p>\n Browne, S. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness<\/em>. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.<\/p>\n Cromer,\u00a0R., and\u00a0S. Bjork-James.\u00a02023. \u201cDeploying fetal death: \u201cFetal burial\u201d laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana\u201d. In:\u00a0PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review,<\/em>\u00a046:\u00a09\u201323.<\/p>\n du Gay, P. and K.Z. Pedersen 2020. \u201cDiscretion and Bureaucracy\u201d. In: Evans, T., Hupe, P. (eds). Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.<\/p>\n Finney, C. 2014. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. <\/em>University of North Carolina Press.<\/p>\n Liboiron, M. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism<\/em>. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.<\/p>\n McGoey, L. 2007. \u201cOn the will to ignorance in bureaucracy\u201d. In: Economy and Society<\/em> 36(2): 212\u2013235.<\/p>\n Roy, A. 2005. \u201cUrban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning\u201d. In: Journal of the American Planning Association<\/em> 71(2): 147\u2013158.<\/p>\n Strathern, M. 2000. \u201cNew Accountabilities; Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy\u201d. In: Strathern, M. (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy<\/em>. Routledge: London and New York: 1\u201318.<\/p>\n Tucker, J.L., and M. Anantharaman 2020. \u201cInformal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation\u201d. In: One Earth<\/em> (Cambridge, Mass.) 3: 290\u2013299.<\/p>\n T\u00fcrem, Z.U. and A. Ballestero 2014. \u201cRegulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields\u201d. In: Indiana Journal of Global and Legal Studies<\/em> 21(1): 1\u201325.<\/p>\n van Eijk, M. 2018. \u201cThe Anthropology of \u201cBoring\u201d Things<\/a>\u201c. In: Medical Anthropology Quarterly<\/em> Second Spear Blog Series. Accessed August 7, 2024.<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\n
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![Source<\/a>. One of the common ways to think about regulation \u2014 especially in conservative circles \u2014 is as a hurdle to business and consumer liberties. This is encapsulated in](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Strajk_przedsi%C4%99biorc%C3%B3w_16.05.2020_(8).jpg\"){kind=link}