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5 Regul. & Governance 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/rgulangnce5 and id is 1 raw text is: Regulation & Governance (2011) 5, 1-13 GUEST EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION The sociological citizen: Pragmatic and relational regulation in law and organizations 1. Introduction The interconnected networks that constitute our everyday lives can be both intensely familiar yet completely unknown. Whether we call it a firm, a university, an industry, a system, or a society, we live and work in collectivities coordinated through human, physical, and chemical transits. Most of the time, we fail to notice the links that connect one action to another, one person to hundreds of others, and one organization to a framing institution or field of action. We may be momentarily reminded of those rela- tions when a major disaster occurs, or we chat with a new acquaintance actively seeking common ground. More often, however, articulations among people and places are mediated through representations, in effect, known of but not part of how we live and work. The articles collected in this special issue of Regulation & Governance challenge this conventional account of the unconscious threads assembling the social (Thevenot 2004; Latour 2005). With case studies ranging from Australia to France, Mexico, Brazil, and the US, the articles describe how some organizational agents apprehend relational interde- pendence and use this systemic perspective to meet occupational and professional obli- gations (Silbey et al. 2009, p. 203). We call these public agency regulators, inspectors, prosecutors, private managers, and microloan officers sociological citizens, and the consequent performance of their professional obligations relational regulation (Huising & Silbey 2011). These concepts identify and name patterns of relatively success- ful, and distinctly pragmatic, regulatory implementation achieved across diverse roles, organizations, and locales. Although sociology is a scholarly occupation, we invoke the label to identify among a population of non-sociologists (ordinary persons and members of communities and organizations; that is, citizens) an appreciation of the processes that assemble, sustain, reproduce, and, as importantly, revise social transactions, organizations, and institu- tions.1 To actors characterized by this label, the setting in which they perform their professional obligations - a bank, a firm, a university, a security agency, or a local economy - is understood as the outcome of human decisions and indecisions, trial and error, and just plain making do (Silbey et al. 2009, p. 203). The organization is experi- enced as a garbage can rather than a rational plan (Cohen et al. 1988). Sociological citizens, acting as managers and law enforcement agents. See their work and themselves as links in a complex web of interactions and processes rather than as a cabin of limited interests and demarcated responsi- bilities. Instead of focusing closely, as we normally do to manage daily affairs, and only sporadically taking account, if ever, of the larger reverberations of one's © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd doi:10.1 I I I /j.1748-5991.2011.01106.x

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