When societalization stalls: the semantics of code switching and the work of the soft legal realm

Abstract The dominant sociological view is that there are too many public crises. This article points to a different problem, namely the tendency for societalization to stall and for too few public crises to be fully realized. Anchored in a detailed analysis of the response to the UK Metropolitan police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the article explores how crisis-events unfold, from their early conception in media coverage through to their treatment as events to be investigated and reviewed. A particular point of focus is the role of a soft legal realm in handling the second of these phases of societalization. In sketching out the work, principles and functions of the soft legal realm, the article suggests that we conceive of this as an interstitial institution, one that, in the early twenty-first century, has become predominantly responsible for the translation and treatment of would-be public crises in the UK, and beyond. The article ends by identifying a set of key threats to the legitimacy of this institution in managing the messy border relations of the civil and non-civil sphere.