Browsing by Author "Sandefur, Rebecca L."

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    Paralegals and the casualization of legal labour markets
    (Hart Publishing, 2022) Hersant, Jeanne Marie Daniele; Hersant, Jeanne; Holvast, Nina; Sandefur, Rebecca L.; Sommerlad, Hilary; Abel, Richard
    Hilary Sommerlad Jeanne Hersant Nina Holvast Luca Verzelloni Stefanie Gustafsson Rebecca L Sandefur Tom Clarke Hilary Sommerlad The market-oriented economic and social revolutions which were transforming Western societies from the end of the eighteenth century (Polanyi 1957) enabled some actors to gain ‘control over a set of work-related tasks … organize a body of knowledge around those tasks … and fend off incursions from other social groups into [their] domain’ (Ryfe 2017: xx) . The success of this ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn 1983) therefore turned on establishing the cognitive exclusivity and superiority of their services and controlling the ‘production of producers’ (Larson 2013) . As major forces in the developing rationalisation of society, this task entailed objective verification of professional competence, thereby connecting inequality to expertise rather than social category (ibid) . Since this expertise was inseparable from the person (and personality) of the professional, creating social credit also necessitated the...