Relational legal consciousness in the age of informational capitalism: how Americans make sense of data privacy

Socio-legal scholarship increasingly conceptualizes legal consciousness as relational, yet research has focused primarily on how individuals’ understandings of law are shaped through interpersonal interactions and social relationships. Less attention has been paid to how broader cultural beliefs circulating within political-economic systems shape whether – and how – individuals invoke or refrain from invoking law when interpreting everyday experiences. We extend relational legal consciousness scholarship by examining how macro-level cultural beliefs structure meaning-making about digital data privacy in the United States. We analyze data from a survey experiment in which 600 respondents evaluated vignettes describing secondary uses of personal data by government and private corporations for different motives. Quantitative analyses of 2,555 vignette evaluations show that perceived acceptability varies systematically by both actor and motive. Interpretive analysis of open-ended responses reveals that participants draw on multiple cultural beliefs – including everyday expectations of legality, market logics, institutional trust, and narratives of technological inevitability – when evaluating these practices. By showing how cultural beliefs related and unrelated to law and legality work together to shape everyday interpretations of privacy encroachments, we extend relational legal consciousness scholarship beyond interpersonal relationships to encompass the broader cultural environment in which legal meaning-making occurs. We further demonstrate that this relational dynamic has political-economic consequences: a diverse range of cultural beliefs – not only narratives of commodification and technological inevitability – can normalize, conditionally legitimate, or challenge the data practices associated with informational capitalism.