Introduction

Since its creation in 1999, the UN Global Compact (UNGC) has been discussed as a prime example of global governance involving multinational enterprises (MNEs) (Rasche and Gilbert, 2012; see also Ruggie, 2001). As a multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI), the UNGC is designed to bring different entities together to discuss and improve standards for human rights, labour conditions and the environment, as well as combat corruption. Fostering corporate social responsibility (CSR), transparency and dialogue, the UNGC, at least for advocates, promotes and expands fundamental responsibilities of business in a globalized economy. Such an economy, it has been argued, is ‘ungovernable’ through states alone (Held and McGrew, 2002). With this logic, the UNGC marks an important step towards a more inclusive and effective global governance (Brown et al, 2018). Contrary to this, critics of the UNGC have emphasized that the Compact remains limited in its current form since compliance with its principles remains voluntary and the network appears too loose (Andrews, 2019). Following this account, the UNGC, at best, has no impact. At worst, it provides an opportunity for MNEs to ‘bluewash’ themselves by capitalizing on the moral authority of the UN (Berliner and Prakash, 2015).

Going into its third decade, the debate between these two sides has not been settled and the overall impact of the initiative remains more uncertain than ever (Podrecca et al, 2021). In this chapter, I want to relate to and weigh in on this debate by framing the UNGC through the lens of interorganizational relations (IOR). The rationale for this is simple: I argue that both advocates and critics rely on a similar and ultimately limited ontology of governance and the UNGC. Both assume the existence of independent global governors deliberately interacting within the Compact. The UNGC as such becomes a space to meet but otherwise does not have any transformational impact on the actors involved (Barrese et al, 2020). In other words, neither reading takes inter-organizational dynamics into consideration that potentially change how MSIs evolve over time and constitutively affect their participants. Furthermore, neither reflects how MNEs, NGOs, cities and other public-sector entities mutually recognize each other and thereby (re)produce their agency as constituents within the UNGC.

It’s 2014 and blowing a hoolie. I rush into an echoey old church. It’s cold but the single mums are friendly. A steel urn puffs steam up to the ornate rafters. I relent and accept a smiley face biscuit. Angela is taut as she rattles out her story. She doesn’t mind looking for jobs – it’s what she’s doing anyway. It’s the near miss with a sanction she’s angry about. The injustice burns. It was six months ago but still fresh in her mind.

On the day, Angela phoned and told her work coach that she couldn’t come in because she had to stay at home with her 11-year-old daughter who was recovering from a bull-terrier attack outside their door the night before. Angela wasn’t sanctioned but she felt scarred by it. She needed flexibility and empathy from her work coach. What she actually got was a stern warning that if something like that happened again her benefits would get cut.

Angela is 34. She’s a lone parent with three kids, 6, 11 and 13. Her narrow escape from sanctions is intensely emotive. The bottom line for women in her position is that “you can’t always [work] as a mother, you’ve got to make sure your little one’s fine”.

Angela used to work at a call centre but finds it difficult to balance a job with looking after her kids. The second time we speak to her, Angela is working part-time for a call centre but on a self-employed basis. A year later, she has moved off Jobseeker’s Allowance onto Employment and Support Allowance Support Group because the stress worsened her asthma and depression. She now volunteers as ‘permitted work’ in a charity shop two days per week.

Introduction

Angela’s brush with the sanctions system came at a traumatic time and had long-lasting negative impacts. Many women in the study feared or experienced sanctions during very difficult times in their lives.

Introduction

During the last two decades, with the implementation of populist neo-liberal policies, Turkish agriculture has gone through a comprehensive restructuring which has led to economic and social transformations. Petty commodity producers have become distanced from agriculture, the peasantry has declined, and a majority of the young rural population has moved to the cities, and comprise an informal labour force. Those who stayed in the rural areas have became proletariat on their own land with the pervasive implementation of contract farming by the agro-food companies. These transformations on the production side are coupled with the food crises, namely price rises and low-quality foodstuff, in the cities. Alternative consumer cooperatives, (ACCs) with their alternative provisioning system, governance model shaped by direct democracy and a commitment to the premises of the food sovereignty movement, can provide a solution in reconfiguring the prevalent production– consumption nexus. Especially after 2013, as awareness of the social, political and economic effects of capitalism grew, we began to witness the progression of alternative cooperatives in Turkey. In the Turkish context, alternative consumer cooperatives, besides forming a site for the development of an alternative to the capitalist forms of organizing, provide a remarkable example in terms of divergence from the conventional consumer cooperatives (CCCs).

The cooperative movement in Turkey is rooted in the examples that were developed during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. These early examples provide the background to understanding the evolution of the CCCs; they were established by the deliberate efforts of statesmen in an effort to provide a solution to the problems faced by villagers. Secondly, although there were some initiatives for a cooperative model based on the example in Rochdale, their operations were terminated by the ruling party. These grassroots initiatives, shaped by the ideas of the intellectuals Mustafa Suphi, Ethem Nejat and Ahmet Cevat, were expected to by-pass the middlemen and support the consumers to be their own producer. These experiences are important in underlining the dominant role of the state and the tensions between the ruling cadres and the intellectuals, and provide an explanation of how cooperatives are instrumentalized by the state. Similar tendencies shaped the cooperative movement in the early days of the Republic; cooperatives were mainly initiated by a state-owned organization (for example, a bank or factory) with the aim of providing affordable foodstuff to their members and to control price rises.

Introduction

Sports is a relevant subject for international relations (IR). Countless people around the world organize in sports clubs and associations or practice independently regardless of their specific circumstances. Cities bid for hosting sports events that many want to attend and watch. Companies place advertisements at these events and their broadcasts, politicians show up and pose with athletes. Supporters or athletes point out human rights violations or other grievances related to federations organizing or countries hosting an event, usually followed by officials of major sports federations claiming sports to be apolitical. These attempts, however, only increase the political character of sports and the necessity to study it.

Along these lines of the global relevance of sports and sports federations, the focus of this chapter is on how both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Since 1896 and 1930 respectively, the IOC and FIFA have been holding tournaments that are now among the largest sports events in terms of participation and attention. Athletes representing countries from all continents take part in these events, while around 40 per cent of the world population are watching (Fett, 2020).

Interested in inter-organizational relations (IOR) and their contributions to world order, we study the IOC and FIFA through the lens of both an open system's perspective from organization studies (Scott, 1992 [1981]) and classical pragmatism (Peirce, 1998 [1903]; Dewey, 1991 [1927]). We ask how both organizations are embedded in their environments and what beliefs as rules for action they follow in the context of Russian aggression. We assume that the beliefs held by those who speak on behalf of the IOC and FIFA contribute to world order, understood as a specific constellation of beliefs on how human life is organized (Roos, 2015). These beliefs become manifest in practice, in what those who act in the name of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the IOC, FIFA or other ‘structures of corporate practice’ do (Franke and Roos, 2010: 1065–9).

Margaret cares. Her pebble-dash council house on the outskirts of Glasgow reminds me of my gran’s. It’s sparse-side modest and scrupulously clean. It’s quiet and still. It feels a bit empty, as if she doesn’t quite fill the room. Something, and I soon realise someone, is missing. We drink hot thin tea in floral mugs and she tells me about losing her mum. Margaret lives her life caring for others – bringing up her children, then looking after mum until she died.

In 2014, at the age of 59, Margaret (White Scottish) is near the end of her ‘working life’. She’s up against unfamiliar expectations: claiming for Universal Credit digitally when she has never used a computer before; chasing proof of her rental agreement for the home she’s lived in all her adult life; asking her daughter for food over her six weeks without income, while she waits for her first payment; looking for work 35 hours a week.

These policy realities are alien to Margaret’s lifelong expectations about her role as a mother, a wife and a daughter. Finally, without anyone to care for, Margaret’s identity is abruptly rewritten as an unemployed benefit claimant – a giver who feels like a taker. The hours that had been filled by serving the personal needs of her family were suddenly requisitioned for online job search, indistinguishable from the expectations of the young ablebodied men we spoke to. Margaret was required to adapt immediately to welfare conditionality as if she were unencumbered by grief and ill-health, as if she were fully at ease with IT. Her private caring life is rewritten as a public work responsibility and it is the culture shock of a lifetime.

Introduction

Margaret’s life is a life lived caring – a biography of family-orientated interdependence that is familiar to many working-class women of her age and a far cry from the individualistic economic rationales of welfare reform. Margaret’s story epitomises the consequences of the policy shift from viewing women primarily as carers to workers. Women in Margaret’s position have their lives mediated textually by employment and social security law. This chapter begins by reflecting on enduring gender inequalities in the paid labour market and persistent patterns of unpaid care.

Introduction

In its 75th year, despite the hallowed role that the NHS plays in the UK national psyche, the NHS found itself in a parlous position. Across a range of measures, the NHS was facing unprecedented pressures in 2023. First, public satisfaction with the NHS had fallen to its lowest recorded level – 29 per cent, falling 7 percentage points from 2021. Equally significant was the level of dissatisfaction with the NHS, at 51 per cent (Morris et al, 2023). Second, waiting lists were at an all-time high of 7.2 million (as of December 2022). Much of this can be explained by delayed care due to COVID-19 (a rise of 2 million since the start of the pandemic). This was despite the ‘elective recovery plan’ published in 2022 (NHS England, 2022). Third, there were 133,000 (full-time equivalent) vacancies in the NHS in September 2022, a vacancy rate of 9.7 per cent (Health Foundation, 2022). Vacancies in social care stood at 165,000, a vacancy rate of 10.7 per cent (King’s Fund, 2023). Fourth, there was a wave of strikes among NHS staff. Members of the Royal College of Nursing went on strike for the first time in their history. They were joined by ambulance staff and junior doctors. NHS consultants had also voted for strike action. Fifth, while pay can explain some of the causes of these strikes, it is likely that high levels of stress and burnout were also significant factors. The 2022 NHS Staff Survey (published in March 2023) indicated that 45 per cent of staff were unwell due to work-related stress and 57 per cent had come to work despite feeling unwell. Overall, 34 per cent of staff felt burnout, with ambulance staff being especially prone (49 per cent) (Nuffield Trust, 2023).

The conditions prevailing in 2023 were the confluence of factors in the previous several years – financial austerity from 2010, the Brexit referendum vote in 2016 (and the consequent impact upon recruitment and retention of staff and pharmaceuticals) and COVID-19 pandemic (from March 2020). Arguably, the conditions were also the result of the NHS’ politics, policies and organisational structure over the previous 75 years. So it is timely to reassess the contribution and state of the NHS in the past, in the present and in the future.

Introduction

When the Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) was expelled from the country in 2019, this heralded the end of a successful experiment in international cooperation. The commission was a unique governance arrangement in the rule of law sector that was embedded in a dense web of inter-organizational relations (IOR), interacting with organizations at different layers of governance, ranging from the global to the local. Anti-impunity commissions are part of a broader global trend towards hybrid governance solutions, which are located in the middle of a continuum, with purely international mechanisms (using international law, international staff and enjoying supranational powers) occupying one end of the spectrum, and domestic mechanisms (employing national law, local staff and ceding no sovereign privileges to external actors) occupying the other end.

This present contribution investigates the impact of this novel type of hybrid actor on the rule of law. More specifically, it inquires into how the new hybrids’ entanglement in a web of inter-organizational relations shapes their impact on the culture of lawfulness in their host state. The study of IOR is a relatively young subfield in the discipline of international relations (IR), and within this nascent subdiscipline, the inter-organizational relations of hybrid anti-impunity commissions have not been the subject of academic scrutiny. As noted in the introductory chapter, existing studies of IOR tend to be somewhat limited in terms of organizations and issue-areas studied – privileging relations between international organizations (IOs) in the fields of economic and security governance – and with regard to forms of interaction, in that existing studies tend to assume a binary distinction between cooperative and confrontational relations. The present contribution seeks to correct these biases: first, by introducing a new issue area – judicial cooperation; second, by focusing on a new type of organization – hybrid anti-impunity commissions and their manifold relations with IOs, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and state actors; and third, by demonstrating how hybrid anti-impunity commissions’ inter-organizational relations produce variegated and ambivalent forms of interaction that defy the cooperation vs conflict dichotomy.

Hybrid anti-impunity commissions are deeply embedded in their organizational environment, as they do not seek to supplant the justice system of the target state but fight impunity from within it.

Introduction

Since its inception NHS hospital management has been subject to the ‘bedpan doctrine’. Although no-one seems certain exactly when, Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, is often credited with saying that ‘If a bedpan is dropped on a hospital floor in Tredegar, I want the noise to reverberate in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster’. Essentially, the government is ultimately responsible for how NHS hospitals are managed or mismanaged. However, there are practical limits upon how far central government can actually anticipate or prevent politically awkward developments and events in NHS hospitals. The tension has existed for 75 years since but as we shall see some health policies exacerbate it. This chapter uses the bedpan doctrine as a framework for examining how the governmental balance between central control and local managerial discretion (see Chapter 1) has played out in NHS hospitals, especially since the 2008 financial crash, a watershed in UK economic development (Cribb and Johnson, 2018), including that of NHS hospitals.

What doctrine implies

Central control

A doctrine which attributes to government the ultimate responsibility for the state of NHS services appears to legitimate extensive government involvement in controlling NHS hospitals, an implication which ambitious or reforming policy-makers might welcome. However, the doctrine also implies that governments are also responsible for how NHS hospitals respond to adverse circumstances or events. In the last 75 years that has happened on a grand scale in three ways. One was, and is, the demographic shift. The proportion of UK population aged over 65 has slowly risen, from 16.0 per cent in 2001–02 to 18.6 per cent in 2019–20 (Office for National Statistics, 2022) with the well-known consequences of increasing demand on NHS hospitals, in particular ‘winter pressures’. Rising socio-economic inequality has similar consequences (Kivimäki et al, 2020). Another was the 2008–10 financial crash which was followed by a fiscal policy reversal from expansion to austerity. COVID was the third. Additionally, more transient problems have also recurred, including safety scandals, waiting times and strikes. Even when a government is guiltless in creating such problems, the bedpan doctrine still holds it responsible for making NHS hospitals implement a remedy, and culpable should they appear to fail. The bedpan doctrine may also motivate governments to conceal or massage information that might make them seem culpable.

The expansion of freelancing

The rise of freelancing has become a global trend, including in South Korea, where there is growing interest in this type of work arrangement. However, the term ‘freelancer’ is not clearly defined and is used interchangeably with other terms, such as independent workers, free agents, one-person entrepreneurs and portfolio workers. This lack of clarity has resulted in the notion of freelancers not yet reaching social and legal consensus. Despite the lack of official statistics, studies have identified the increasing demand for and importance of freelancers in society, particularly with the changes in entrepreneurial structures and technological development. This chapter aims to examine the characteristics of freelance work, the insecurity experienced by freelancers, and their experience with the social security system in South Korea, particularly focusing on the four major social insurances. This analysis is related to cell 3 of the thesis matrix, which represents melting labour excluded from institutional protection, such as platform workers and freelancers.

A freelancer is someone who performs professional work independently of an employer or builds a career by working in various organisations on a short-term basis (Lee S.R., 2013). Despite the growing interest in freelancing, there is no clear legal definition of the term, and various designations are used interchangeably, such as independent workers, free agents, one-person entrepreneurs and portfolio workers (Kwon K.W., 2007; Hwang J.W. et al, 2009). These designations explain that freelancers create value with their professionalism and generate economic results by working on free contracts without specific affiliations. The term ‘independent workers’ refers to people who work without employment contracts, while ‘portfolio workers’ are individuals who organise their career as solo entrepreneurs with portfolios of clients, tasks and roles, similar to professional freelancers.

Introduction

This chapter explores whether it is possible to revive the exhausted region of Sorachi (Sorachi, 2022), located in the centre of Hokkaido, an island in the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, by adopting insights from the Preston Model (Preston Model, 2022), a regional revitalization program currently underway in Preston, England. The aim is to evaluate the universal value and potential of the Preston Model to transcend regional and national boundaries.

The Preston Model, which has been attracting attention in the UK in recent years, is characterized by a simple mechanism to ‘keep money circulating within the region and keep it from flowing out’. The concept of ‘keeping the money circulating within the region’ has already been advocated by many researchers, and some trial-and-error efforts have already begun to put it into practice, especially through the experiment of introducing local currencies, such as the Bristol pound (Johnson and Harvey-Wilson, 2018; Marshall and O’Neill, 2018). However, the Preston Model is groundbreaking and significant in that it has proposed and put into action a concrete place-making system firmly linked to cooperative values and visions (Manley and Whyman, 2021). As shown in Chapter 11 of this volume, key elements include persuading anchor institutions to buy services locally and in smaller contracts, as well as a concerted effort to promote the creation of local cooperatives to meet anchor institution need and other local demands.

Although the potential for this model is gaining traction in the UK, we need to consider the following question: Can this British model be applied to the regeneration of regions on the other side of the world, where the social environment is completely different? In other words, this is both a question and consideration of its universality and an exploration of the potential of cooperative place-making (Webster et al, 2021). If a version of the Preston Model were to be applied to the revitalization of a former coal-producing region in Japan such as Hokkaido which faces economic and social decline, various obstacles would be encountered. First, transferring a model designed to meet the needs of a locality in one part of the world to a place where the sociocultural environment is completely different will inevitably demand at the very least, considerable adaptation.

Melting labour and the variety of precarious workers

The concept of melting labour served as the analytical prism throughout the book to establish the contours of emerging precarious workers and their variety. The book focused on melting labour as companies and capital evolved the capital accumulation mode alongside technological development. The issues observed in newly expanding forms of work overlapped with the Korean labour market, such as platform work, freelancers and other long-standing issues related to non-regular workers and precarious selfemployed workers. The new non-standard forms of work went beyond the departure from the standard ‘employment relationship’, and the forms of work were changing in ways that differed from existing standards. However, the precariousness issues associated with these types of work were consistent with those discussed thus far for non-regular workers. The longstanding problems of non-regular workers and those brought about by the emerging ‘form’ of work needed to be explored from a comprehensive and integrated perspective.

In this book I presented a comprehensive analysis of the intersections between institutional protection and melting labour in the Korean context, utilising a theoretical framework that categorises precarious workers based on their level of institutional protection and melting labour. The specific case studies in this book illustrate the experiences of precarious workers in Korea, including the process by which regular workers can fall into precarious work, the disparities between the subcontracting labour market and social safety net, the concentration of female workers in precarious forms of work, and the challenges faced by freelancers and platform workers. The studies utilised qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews and case study analyses, to provide a detailed account of the implications of institutional protection and melting labour for precarious work in Korea.

Precarity is closely tied to workers’ experience of uncertainty, as they are unable to predict the future and lack control over it. Unlike risk, which can be measured and addressed through public and private management programmes, uncertainty poses a sunk cost to human capital and income irregularity can complicate future planning and diminish workers’ control over their lives. Melting labour is a concept that describes the diverse types of work and workplaces that blur the boundaries of traditional ‘standard’ work, particularly formed during times of industrialisation.

Introduction

The experiences of people at work have attracted increasing interest in recent years (Taylor et al, 2017). This has been driven by numerous factors, including the impact of new technologies on jobs, the decline of trade unionism (especially in the UK), the growing casualization of work, the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008 and, most recently, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. All this has generated growing concern about the quality of work and its impact on the wellbeing of workers (Oswald et al, 2015). Worker co-operatives have played an important role in responding to these factors, offering secure and good quality work even in times of crisis (Roelants et al, 2012; Birchall, 2013; Berry and Bell, 2018). This has been attributed to their dual socio-economic purpose and solidarity with their community, and structural characteristics including democratic decision-making and worker ownership (Cheney et al, 2014; Peredo and McLean, 2020; Billiet et al, 2021). More broadly, there has long been strong advocacy of the ethical dimension of cooperative commercial enterprise, notably emphasizing member democracy (Rothschild, 2009), concern for the wider community and the environment (Novkovic, 2008; Mellor, 2012; Phelan, McGee and Godon, 2012), and a commitment to high standards of working conditions (Restakis, 2010; Ruccio, 2011; Carlone, 2013).

Taking two UK worker co-operatives, this chapter will explore the extent to which the experiences of worker-members differ from those working in ‘mainstream’ commercial organizations. More specifically it will explore how worker ownership and democratic member control can enable workers to put social and environmental values into practice, and through this, cocreate work that is meaningful. Drawing on secondary literature on worker cooperatives, the chapter will draw some tentative conclusions about common experiences across Europe, and the extent to which they reflect the UK examples analysed. The chapter draws upon the increasingly complex debate about what constitutes ‘meaningful’ work, and the extent to which cooperative experiences meet these definitions.

Worker co-operatives and work as a field of study

There are extensive literatures on ‘decent’ and ‘meaningful’ work, and on worker co-operatives. This section will lay out some of the key arguments and findings in these fields and will provide a wider context for the indepth studies later in the chapter.

Introduction: the ‘logic’ of relevance

How do we know when a complainant’s sexual history is relevant to the question of whether she was raped? The legal consensus is to view this is as a matter of logic and common sense. These are the concepts to which judges appeal when assessing claims of evidentiary relevance. They also surface repeatedly in legislative and policy debate. Logic and common sense are seen here as pathways to objectivity and truth. We know sexual history evidence is relevant when it helps to establish, objectively, what has occurred; when it has a material bearing upon the truth or falsity of what is alleged.

How though do we know that the evidence bears truthfully upon the facts? What intellectual processes prompt us to connect one factual claim, for example that the complainant consented to sex with the defendant on a previous occasion, with another, that is, that the complainant consented to sex with the defendant on the occasion forming the subject matter of the charge? This is precisely what the concept of relevance enables us to do, to connect disparate facts so that one has probative potency in relation to another. In his classic textbook, Law of Evidence, Ian Dennis (2020) breaks down the moves entailed in establishing relevance to reveal their logical base. At the heart of most relevance claims, he explains, is a form of deductive reasoning, whereby the truth of a proposition depends on applying a major premise (‘all men are mortal’), to a minor premise (‘Socrates is a man’) to deduce a conclusion (‘Socrates is mortal’). The minor premise and the conclusion are the ‘facts’ to be connected; the major premise provides the basis for connecting them. Determinations of relevance, Dennis explains, generally take this syllogistic form (2020: 3–003).

Of critical importance here is the role played by the major premise. Without the major premise, the minor premise and the conclusion are simply random, unconnected facts. From where do we get the major premise, and how do we know it is sound? This is where ‘common sense’ comes into play. The major premise is drawn from general experience, it is part of ‘our common stock of knowledge about the world’ (Dennis, 2020: 3–002).

The gender gap in the Korean female labour market

This chapter examines the rise of precarious jobs through outsourcing in the service economy, particularly affecting young and old female workers. The chapter sheds light on the inconsistencies between institutions for decommodification and melting labour, leading to an expansion of female precarious workers in the Korean labour market. The problems faced by these newly emerging forms of work overlap with those of non-regular workers, and it is necessary to comprehensively examine both types of issues. Through empirical data and interviews with 23 workers and union leaders, the chapter highlights the gender gap in the Korean labour market, focusing on young female call centre workers and examining the issues of institutional protection and job instability surrounding older and younger female subcontracted labour in call centres and cleaning services. The chapter underscores how outsourcing has become more accessible due to technological development and offers insights into the unique challenges faced by female workers in precarious forms of work.

The Korean female labour market is characterised by a high concentration of females in irregular employment and a wide wage gap. Despite the fact that more than 82.8 per cent of Korean women have tertiary education degrees as of 2020, the wage gap between genders in Korea is still high, at 33 per cent, which is significantly higher than in the US (19 per cent), the UK (13 per cent) and Germany (3 per cent) (Jung E.H., 2015). Lee S.Y. and Kim Y.H. (2020) also pointed out the barriers to gender pay equality presented by the South Korean gendered dual labour market structure, particularly the gendered division between regular and irregular work. While there has been some progress in recent years, with the ratio of female to total male earnings increasing from 58 per cent in 2006 to 64 per cent in 2018, this progress has been limited given the narrow and decreasing educational attainment gap between men and women and the introduction of legislative measures to address gender discrimination in the labour market.

Why history?

The 18th-century jurist William Blackstone famously said: ‘It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer’ (Blackstone, 1803, IV.27). This is just one example of how the contemporary criminal trial is expressive of value judgements which, while made long ago, have since assumed the status of fundamental principles in modern criminal justice. Few criminal law scholars would deny that their territory is deeply normatively imbued. Indeed, much criminal law scholarship today is preoccupied with normative enquiry into the moral rationales for criminalising individual acts (Wertheimer, 2003; Duff, 2018; Green, 2020).

From where does the normative content of criminal law come, and how does it acquire weight and validity? This is first and foremost a historical question. As Alan Norrie argues, the normative contours of contemporary criminal law were ‘formed in a particular historical epoch [which Norrie identifies with 18th-century Enlightenment thought] and derived their characteristic shape from fundamental features of the social relations of that epoch’ (Norrie, 2014: 10). Lacey too emphasises the historical dimensions of criminal law, showing how conceptions of the criminal subject have varied over time and space so that ascriptions of criminal responsibility are best understood, not abstractly but contextually, in relation to ‘broader social, cultural, political and economic developments’ (Lacey, 2016: vii). By historicising and contextualising criminal law, Norrie and Lacey highlight the specificity of the ideas and perceptions of human relations which underpin modern criminal justice. Importantly, their work reveals not only that criminal law is normatively imbued, but also that the terms of normative engagement are historically derived, governed by conceptions of human nature, social relations and the role, functions and legitimacy of the state, which are now so well embedded in the criminal justice infrastructure as to appear beyond contest. ‘At the core of the philosophy behind criminal law’, Norrie comments, ‘is a moral individualism which proclaims that for the state to intervene against the individual, it must have a good and clear licence to do so’ (Norrie, 2014: 13). Both Norrie and Lacey set out to represent the liberal individualism of criminal law – the unchallenged and essentially unchallengeable foundation of the criminal justice edifice – as a social and historical construct which derives its weight and validity from the ‘ideas, interests and institutions’ (Lacey, 2016) that shaped its formation and development.

Introduction

It might be naturally assumed that the cooperative character – by which we mean organizational characteristics that are defined by cooperative principles and values – must necessarily be limited to cooperative organizations, whose rules require that such principles and values be embedded in the organization's governance. This chapter asks to what extent is it realistic to suggest that the cooperative character could also be part of a non-cooperative organization such as a local council of elected representatives? This is the interesting case of the growth of local councils around the UK who are self-denominating as ‘cooperative councils’ and committing themselves to cooperative ways of working by joining the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network (CCIN). Inherent in this discussion is a seeming link between CWB and co-operatives or, if not cooperative businesses, the connection to a feeling or ‘sense of co-operation’ within councils and the communities that they serve and between councils belonging to the CCIN. A sense of co-operation is a rather vague and somewhat abstract notion, so what is this ‘sense’, if it exists, and does it have any value? This chapter is also an enquiry into the validity and authenticity of this notion. Finally, a discussion of a network of cooperative councils must also bring with it the recently revived concept of ‘new municipalism’, analysed and usefully summarized by Thompson (2021).

This chapter, therefore, begins with a discussion of the turn to new municipalism and the balance or tension between a vision of a future that is both socially radically transformative on the one hand and practical and achievable on the other. This aspirational, some would say utopic, vision projects an alternative to capitalism through a system of mutual support, altruism for the common good, equality, equity, renewed democracy and the removal of hierarchies (Bookchin, 2005). At the core of this socioeconomic transformation is an approach, embodied by the CCIN, that highlights the apparently irreconcilable, even bipolar opposites of cooperation and competition. The central question that arises from this conflict is how can co-operation function in the context of competition? In the UK and elsewhere, different versions of crisis, but all in the context of the failures of capitalist scenarios of competition, have been a trigger for co- operation: austerity politics in Preston (Preston Model), the housing crisis in Barcelona (Barcelona en Comu), racial discrimination in Mississippi (Co- operation Jackson), with each geographical location providing its own version of a cooperative society.