10.17863/CAM.11221
Deakin, Simon
0000-0002-1725-5216
Tony Lawson's Theory of the Corporation: Towards a Social Ontology of Law
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2017
social ontology
the corporation
legal evolution
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2017-09-26
2017-09-26
2017-08-28
en
Article
0168-6445
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/267408
1574-6976
Attribution 4.0 International
Attribution 4.0 International
Attribution 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
In his account of the corporation as a ‘community’, Tony Lawson advances a materialist theory of social reality to argue for the existence of emergent social structures based on collective practices and behaviours, distinguishing his position from John Searle’s theory of social reality as consisting of declarative speech acts. Lawson’s and Searle’s accounts are examined for what they imply about the relationship between social structures and legal concepts. It is argued that legal concepts are themselves a feature of social reality and that a consequence of the law’s recognition of the ‘reality’ of the corporation is to open up the activities of business firm to a distinct form of normative ordering.
I ... acknowledge funding from the ESRC (Project ES/J012491/1, ‘Law, Development and Finance in Rising Powers’).
Economic and Social Research Council
ES/J012491/1