Joint ‘anormative’ regulation from status inconsistency: A multilevel spinning top model of specialized institutionalization

From a neo-structural perspective, the link between anormative regulation and morphogenesis (Archer, 2016) has far-reaching implications. This chapter argues that this link sheds a strong critical light on joint regulatory processes co-driven by the two most powerful actors in contemporary organizational societies: states and businesses. It does so by looking at how specific institutional entrepreneurs, who are part of collegial oligarchies mixing public and private elites, use procedural law as ‘weak culture’ (Breiger, 2010) to produce, rank and promote specialized norms. Our setting is the emergence of the European Unified Patent Court, and the institutional entrepreneurs are intellectual property judges assembled by corporate lawyers to frame the new institution. This multilevel regulatory process is represented by the heuristic image of a multilevel spinning top and is shown to be close to institutional capture