Description
The impact of the American
rescue culture and the acceptability of failure, the development of international insolvency
laws within the European Union and localized problems inherent in current insolvency
practice provided the impetus for legal reform. Using the work of Halliday (1985, 1987),
this paper seeks to understand how professional knowledge and authority impact upon
the state–profession relationship and the development and deployment of state policy.
The British Government reacted to the global and local pressures with a shift to codification
and prescription, greater enforcement of the legal system and an attempt to control and
institutionalize insolvency practitioners’ moral authority. However in spite of radical
reforms, insolvency practitioners’ services were retained and their private, expert knowl-
edge systems and authority valorized over corporate management. Insolvency practitio-
ners’ localized knowledge, the capacity to disguise moral authority as technical expertise
and their networks and coalitions with senior members of Parliament and capital provid-
ers, resulted in an interpretation and implementation of legislation that has not seen the
dramatic shift in practice that the reforms had envisaged. Despite the reforms being trig-
gered within the global institutional sphere of corporate failure, the institutional sphere
of corporate failure, at least in Scotland, retains a local definition, with business rescue
packages derived from professionals’ social intelligence, their daily micropractices and
localized networks.
doc_662520148.pdf
The impact of the American
rescue culture and the acceptability of failure, the development of international insolvency
laws within the European Union and localized problems inherent in current insolvency
practice provided the impetus for legal reform. Using the work of Halliday (1985, 1987),
this paper seeks to understand how professional knowledge and authority impact upon
the state–profession relationship and the development and deployment of state policy.
The British Government reacted to the global and local pressures with a shift to codification
and prescription, greater enforcement of the legal system and an attempt to control and
institutionalize insolvency practitioners’ moral authority. However in spite of radical
reforms, insolvency practitioners’ services were retained and their private, expert knowl-
edge systems and authority valorized over corporate management. Insolvency practitio-
ners’ localized knowledge, the capacity to disguise moral authority as technical expertise
and their networks and coalitions with senior members of Parliament and capital provid-
ers, resulted in an interpretation and implementation of legislation that has not seen the
dramatic shift in practice that the reforms had envisaged. Despite the reforms being trig-
gered within the global institutional sphere of corporate failure, the institutional sphere
of corporate failure, at least in Scotland, retains a local definition, with business rescue
packages derived from professionals’ social intelligence, their daily micropractices and
localized networks.
doc_662520148.pdf