After a Romantic Aspiration to Society: Harnessing the Regulatory Capacity of a Social Sphere

This introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be har-nessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state reg-ulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regula-tory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the 2007 financial and subsequent EU sovereign debt crises, which have led to a major rea-lignment of economy and society in a number of countries. This introduction argues that economic sociology is a crucial reference point for understanding more about the social practices that constitute business behavior. It enables to explore the scope and significance of often interlinked social and legal norms for regulating various transna-tional risks that economic activity can give rise to. The introduction therefore locates the quest for understanding more about the regulatory capacity of a social sphere in debates that draw on Karl Polanyi's analy-sis of the embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding of economic activ-ity into social norms. The introduction highlights one of the key themes developed in this special issue, the idea of society within economy which questions an assumed conceptual distinction between economy and society. This introduction concludes by specifying how the accounts of risk regu-lation developed in this special issue chart a path that is different from recent explorations of the role of a social sphere in regulation, which were conducted under the banner of "the sociological citizen," "regula-tory sociability," and "collaborative governance."