Luhmann without tears: complex economic regulation and the erosion of the market sphere

Abstract

One of the concepts central to the ‘reconceiving’ of the ‘regulatory state’ during ‘the age of regulatory reform’ which we might trace back to the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s, has been that of the ‘hybrid’ form of economic organisation. Rejection of command-and-control regulation led, in the public sector, to the adoption of ‘marketmimicking’, a technique that claimed to replace the hierarchical direction of planning with the mobilisation of self-interest in ‘quasi-markets’, thereby merging ‘economic’ incentivisation with the ‘political’ stipulation of the markets' outcomes. In the private sector, institutions that had long been recognised to sit between contract and the company, of which the franchise had been the most thoroughly analysed within contract law, began to be regarded as ‘networks’.