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Building on earlier work, we state the case for an economic sociology of labour law which recognises and investigates the co-constitutive nature of law and the economy. Reviewing recent literature which shares this ambition, we argue that an important element of a co-constitutive theory of law and the economy is an understanding of the ‘legal consciousness’ of economic actors, meaning, in essence, their participation in the construction of legality or legalities, defined here as social structures which both enable and constrain actors. While a small number of studies have sought to understand the legal consciousness of workers, none that we are aware of has investigated the legal consciousness of human resource managers. This is a significant omission. Drawing on existing research in the field, we demonstrate the importance of human resource management (HRM) as a site where legalities can become bound up with other, especially market-focused and managerial, rationales, with significant consequences for compliance and enforcement. As a first step towards understanding the legal consciousness of human resource managers, we then situate HRM within a context of contradictory professional discourses and ideologies, and of processes of justification and legitimation of contemporary capitalism.

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By purporting to depoliticize markets, international economic law complicates solutions to precarity and inequality within and between states and regions. Separating out markets from ordinary politics, the novel legal orders of trade and investment choose winners and losers, determining who will adapt to whom so as to render their policy goals most efficacious. In so doing, trade and investment law expresses preferences about how political and social life should be organized, rendering solutions to pressing social problems more difficult to address. This chapter interrogates these two legal regimes, arguing that they exhibit a similar tilt that favours global capital, precipitating similar legitimacy problems, and kindred responses that aim to manage the fallout. They reveal, in other words, startling comparable trajectories that rely on similar techniques to manage resistance. International economic law’s plan of action turns out to be unified: to deflect critique, disarm states and weaponize legal rules. We conclude that, so long as international economic law does not take precarity and inequality seriously, its trade and investment regimes will remain vulnerable to political blowback.