Doctoral student Michael Polson (Graduate Center, City University of New York), under the guidance of Dr. Leith Mullings, will investigate how citizens negotiate changes in law and regulatory policy. Everyday thousands of people navigate what can be a contradictory landscape, particularly concerning legal changes in medical regulation. The researcher will examine the process of social change in the realm of regulation as a dynamic system of co-production rather than a top-down change. Using a variety of social science research methods, he will study the product landscape as a network comprised of producers, consumers, policymakers, and medical professionals. He will conduct interviews and participant observation, collect and analyze social network data, and apply Actor-Network Theory to explore the intersections of legal and medical change. The goal is to understand the practices and discourses, institutional and power dynamics, and circulation of people, commodities and knowledge within this dynamic network and how they relate to the processes of social change.
The research is important because it will contribute to social scientific understanding of contemporary contours of regulation and public policy. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
This project investigated the various forms of social relations, conflict, and understandings that get produced by ambiguous and formulating policies over markets in California. Based on participant observation of industry, government, and civil society actors, this project concluded that critical struggles over legal, regulatory and economic meaning emerged because of lack of clarity and harmony between various regulatory agencies, commercial institutions, lawmakers, and people’s diverse everyday understandings of policy. The co-PI collected evidence about several of these struggles, including those over environmental regulation and impact assessment; land transaction, land use, and zoning practices and regulations; active vs. passive regulation; policy discussions within non-governmental institutions; market organization and regulation vs. government-controlled organization and regulation; the transference and employment of legal, scientific, and agricultural expertise; and struggles around distribution and production models. From these varied conflicts and policy discussions, the Co-PI gathered data on the multiple influences exerted on policy formation and execution from various players in the social field, developing an understanding of the "co-production" of policy. This project contributes to an understanding of formalizing and informal economies and their relationships to regulatory and legal institutions as well as other civil society institutions in the agricultural field. It looks at the various discursive frames and social relations that frame these economies, including how those in formalizing and informal economies relate to legality, rights, political legitimacy, land and environment, trade education, science, and locality. By understanding the operation of these markets and their relation to other markets and official regulations and laws, this project shows how policy is produced by the complex relations among a panoply of actors in varied positions. It speaks directly to debates over proper forms of state regulation of the market. This project will further our understanding of how policy-ambiguous economies operate in contemporary US society and impact the types of policies that are enacted to regulate, control, prohibit, formalize and tax them. As California cycles through repeated periods of economic downturn, and many residents seek employment outside the confines of a constricting and struggling formal economy, studies like this are important in assessing and understanding what issues are at stake, who is affected and how, and how best we might be able to frame responses to a changing economic landscape.
