Legal Intermediaries As Moral Actors

Based on various fieldworks on the implementation of employment policies, industrial relations, health and safety regulations at workplace and forensics in economics, this communication propose to analyze and compare different legal intermediaries, who daily handle legal rules but are not officially legal professionals. The comparison of employment counsels, unions and HR members, safety officers and forensic accountants is used to determine the main dimensions and variations of legal intermediaries in their activities of framing legality and defining moral boundaries of labor and economic activities. The results of these comparisons show that these different actors play similar roles of legal professionals (as judge, lawyer, inspector or registrar) even if their legitimacy is never acquired and their influence often more subtle on the legality and the boundaries of what is work (as activity as value or social relationship), industrial relations (as legitimate relations at workplace), risks and safety at workplace, or economy (as a special type of interactions).