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The Humdrum of Legality and the Ordering of an Ethic of Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Prashan Ranasinghe
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Abstract

This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of the ways that employees of an emergency shelter create and maintain order. The paper applies the framework of legal consciousness to explicate the practices of the employees that amount to “private ordering.” The employees administer the rules of the shelter in the context of an “ethic of care,” but one that is outside the purview of formal law. This ethic, however, is polysemic, and the employees, therefore, must adopt diverse styles based on their understandings of their professional roles regarding the needs of the clients. The practices of two employees are highlighted in detail, whose strategies in applying and maintaining adherence to shelter rules are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Both make decisions in a somewhat spontaneous and, more importantly, inconsistent, fashion. Despite the complications that arise from applying the rules as such, the employees tolerate, even laud and celebrate, these methods. While this system of private ordering has little resemblance to the ordered, consistent, and rigid application of formal law, it allows the employees to administer diverse strategies of ethics of care and shape practices to fit their professional roles and the complex exigencies of an emergency shelter. The paper locates the extant private ordering not in the law, nor in its shadow—assumed to be preconditions—but outside or beyond them. Given that this ordering is founded against the law—it is not law, nor law-like and has no desire to so be—the paper suggests that it can be thought of as private ordering proper and lays the framework for theorization that accounts for its instrumental and symbolic dimensions.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 709 - 739
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Third Annual National Conference, “Critical Perspectives: Criminology and Social Justice,” University of Ottawa, May 4, 2013 and the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, New York City, New York, August 11, 2013. I am most grateful to Richard Dubé and the two anonymous reviewers who provided extremely helpful, constructive, and invaluable comments that have greatly improved the paper. As well, the sound and straightforward direction received from the editors of the Law & Society Review was immensely helpful and greatly appreciated. I am also grateful to Lisha Di Gioacchino for her research assistance on this project. What is narrated here would not be possible without the cooperation of the numerous personnel at the shelter who warmly welcomed me and permitted and tolerated my intrusions into their work (and, in some cases, personal) lives, all the while patiently responding to the litany of questions I posed. For this, I am extremely appreciative and grateful. The usual disclaimers, of course, apply.

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