Beyond Vertical Flows: Broker Circulation and Sequencing Across Law and Organizations

• In Event: 1567 - Section on Sociology of Law Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 3: Organizations and Institutions

Abstract

Laws are often ambiguous, requiring organizations to develop strategies to interpret and shape compliance. A structural gap in the middle of this implementation frequently involves broker actors, variously identified in literature as ‘regulatory wranglers’ and ‘translators.’ This article builds on that work by identifying circulating experts as playing a role in the legal-political field of affordable housing. I argue that previous work highlights mediating brokers as contributing to the vertical flows of regulatory knowledge and practice from law above to practice below. This article focuses attention on the brokers’ roles in horizontal information flows, specifically movements across place and across time. For place, this means bringing technical and normative expertise to disconnected local stakeholders. For time, this means tracking iterative public deliberation to see how these meso-level actors engage in claim refinement. Paying attention to the horizontal flow of information, as well as the vertical, will enrich our understanding of regulatory interactions, adoption of law on the ground and the possibility for civic engagement in contested issues. Drawing on over two and a half years of ethnographic observations of public hearings of suburban towns dealing with a state affordable housing law, the case is made for the existence and relevance horizontal flows.

Author

• Jennifer Girouard, Marlboro College