Explaining Union Organising During Corporate Mergers

With the emergence of transnational corporations and the resulting internationalisation of union co-determination, unions are found to organise themselves ineffectively in order to deal with this development. This paper attempts to offer a preliminary explanation as to why unions organise themselves in any given way during corporate mergers. A major literature review as well as an in depth case study constitute the basis for the explanation provided in this paper. Our literature study identify five major ideals of union organising, shaping the ways in which unions organise themselves in order to maintain legitimacy. Our in depth case study reveal how these ideals come into play in practice and how actors in a union organising process (re)produce these ideals in resolving issues regarding organisational identity and governance. We integrate our findings in presenting a conceptual model of union organising within transnational corporations, highlighting the diverse interrelationship between ideals as well as between ideals and actors.Union; transnational corporation; industrial relations; co-determination; corporate democracy

A structured argumentation framework for detaching conditional obligations

We present a general formal argumentation system for dealing with the detachment of conditional obligations. Given a set of facts, constraints, and conditional obligations, we answer the question whether an unconditional obligation is detachable by considering reasons for and against its detachment. For the evaluation of arguments in favor of detaching obligations we use a Dung-style argumentation-theoretical semantics. We illustrate the modularity of the general framework by considering some extensions, and we compare the framework to some related approaches from the literature.Comment: This is our submission to DEON 2016, including the technical appendi

Formalising law, or, the return of the Golem

“Good old fashioned” AI, developed first in the 1980s but still an approach used in many contemporary legal apps and law chatbots, is often seen as less likely to create a dangerous “black box society” than machine learning based approaches. The chapter queries this notion by looking at the way in which the very process of formalising the law rests on normative decisions and value commitments that can’t simply be left to software developers. Using the literary figure of the Golem, it traces some of the normative decisions that any legal technology has to make, and posits some desiderata for an ethically responsible theory of legal formalisation

Social Cohesion, Structural Holes, and a Tale of Two Measures

EMBARGOED - author can archive pre-print or post-print on any open access repository after 12 months from publication. Publication date is May 2013 so embargoed until May 2014.This is an author’s accepted manuscript (deposited at arXiv arXiv:1211.0719v2 [physics.soc-ph] ), which was subsequently published in Journal of Statistical Physics May 2013, Volume 151, Issue 3-4, pp 745-764. The final publication is available at link.springer.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10955-013-0722-

Alienating justice: on the social surplus value of the twelfth camel

Deutsche Fassung: Rechtsentfremdungen: Zum gesellschaftlichen Mehrwert des zwölften Kamels. Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 21, 2000, 189-215 und in Gunther Teubner (Hg.) Die Rückgabe des zwölften Kamels: Niklas Luhmann in der Diskussion über Gerechtigkeit. Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart 2000, 189-215. Französische Fassung: Les multiples aliénations du droit : Sur la plus-value sociale du douzième chameau. Droit et Société 47, 2001, 75-100. Polnische Fassung: Sprawiedliwosc alienujaca : O dodatkowej wartosci dwunastego wielblada. Ius et Lex 1, 2002, 109-132. Italienische Fassung: Le molteplici alienazioni del diritto : Sul plusvalore sociale del dodicesimo camello. In: Annamaria Rufino und Gunther Teubner, Il diritto possibile: Funzioni e prospettive del medium giuridico. Guerini, Milano, 2005, 93-130