TAXLAW

On 11 September 2026, TAXLAW will hold its closing conference at Oslo Metropolitan University, and we invite you to participate.

Tax Law Professionals – A Prism for Studying Economic, Political and Expert Power

Taxation is key to the distribution and redistribution of wealth nationally and internationally and the tax system sits at the intersection of markets, state authority, and legal knowledge. Politicians take centre stage in the recurrent and often heated debates of tax policies, yet other groups of actors often operate out of the public eye, but with great influence on the tax system. Tax law professionals – civil servants, judges, academics and lawyers – are key in advising politicians on the shape of new tax legislation and reforms, and they provide them with arguments and legitimacy. These experts also play a crucial role in translating political decisions into impactful economic practices and, conversely, economic interests into legal and policy language. At this conference scholars from the project TAXLAW (The authority of expertise in professional tax law practice) will present key findings and set them in dialogue with scholars in related fields to shed light on how economic, political and expert power interact in the governance of resources in contemporary societies.

Drawing on a large mixed-methods study of tax law professionals in the public and the private sectors in France and in Norway, the conference aims to “open the black box” of tax expertise by examining how it is constructed, practiced and legitimized across sectors, institutions and national contexts. Further drawing on political, economic and cultural sociology, the sociology of professions and expertise, as well as socio-legal studies, this conference uses the case of tax law professionals as a prism to analyze and discuss three thematic areas.

The conference combines presentations of the TAXLAW project’s findings with a public lecture and a concluding panel discussion, organized around three interconnected themes:

1. Political, economic and expert power

Tax expertise plays a key role in policy design, legislative processes, administrative interpretation, and economic strategy. We will present findings on how experts are mobilized for different interests in the battle of fish farming taxation, and how battles over taxation are fought both in the public light and in the back alleys of policy processes. We will also show how expert conception of a good tax system is not a simple and unified thing, but something that varies with the institutional context in which the experts operate – such as between sectors and between countries.

2. Transformation of the public-private interface?

Tax professionals operate across state administrations, private firms, courts, and advisory networks. We will present findings on career mobility and circulation between sectors; on professional identities, values and boundary-drawings; and on the battles between sectors on authoritative expertise. We invite discussions of how the public-private interfaces and power relations are reshaped through legal and economic professionals’ practices.

3. Public lecture Brooke Harrington: The Polycrisis—Offshore Finance and Kleptocracy

Brooke Harrington, professor at Dartmouth College specializing in economic sociology, fiscal sociology and sociology of professions and expertise, will present her work on Offshore-based wealth and the interrelations of economic and expert power in globalized economies.

Panel discussion: Fiscal sociology as a prism for studying multi-faceted power relations
We invite a panel of scholars with complementary areas of expertise to reflect upon and discuss the relevance of studying tax sociologically, as well as of the need to study political, economic and expert power in relation to each other.  We invite the panel to discuss how projects as TAXLAW can contribute to broader debates on the authority of expertise, the transformation of state-market relationships, and the social sciences’ possibilities of scrutinizing power in contemporary societies.

Practical information:

Time and place: 11.09.2026, Oslo Metropolitan University

09:00-12:00: Building P48, room P173

12:00-15:00: Building P44, room V130

The conference is free.

Register here

Programme:

09.00-09.15 Welcome and coffee

09.15–09.30: Introduction: Tax Law Professionals – A Prism for Studying the Relationship between Economic, Political and Expert Power.

• Marte Mangset, University of Oslo and PI of the TAXLAW project

9.30–10.30 Political, economic and expert power

• Symbolic victory, material constraint. A study of power relations between experts, politicians and business in the co-construction of fish farming taxation. Oskar Grannæs Olsen, University of Oslo & Helle Dyrendahl Staven, OsloMet
• What is a good tax system? The institutional embeddedness of expert definitions. Marte Mangset, University of Oslo
• Discussant: Marte Lund Saga, University of Oslo.

10.30–10.45 Break

10.45–12.00 Public lecture: The Polycrisis—Offshore Finance and Kleptocracy.

• Brooke Harrington, Dartmouth College

12.00-12.45 Lunch

12.45-13.45 Transformation of the public-private interface?

• How elite mobility reframe what counts as legitimate tax practice. Helle Dyrendahl Staven, OsloMet
• The asymmetrical negotiation of legal uncertainty: neutral places in taxation law. Jérôme Pélisse, Sciences Po Paris
• Challenging the State’s expert authority. Marte Mangset, University of Oslo
• Discussant: Sigurd M. Nordli Oppegaard, Fafo.

13.45-14.00 Break

14.00-15.00 Panel discussion: Fiscal sociology as a prism for studying power

Participants:

• Brooke Harrington, Darthmouth College
• Marte Mangset, University of Oslo
• Ola Innset, University of Oslo
• TBA

Chair: Helle Dyrendahl Staven, OsloMet

15.00-15.15 Closing remarks

• Marte Mangset, University of Oslo and PI of the TAXLAW project

We are happy to share that a new TAXLAW article by Helle Dyrendahl Staven and Leonard Seabrooke, «Gendered patterns in elite legal careers: men ascend through stability, women through mobility,» has been published in the Journal of Professions and Organization.

The article analyzes how elite Norwegian tax lawyers navigate careers, shifting attention from women’s underrepresentation to how successful women and men reach top roles. Using mixed methods (sequence analysis of career paths and qualitative interviews), it shows that men more often rise through stable, single-sector careers (in law firms or the Tax Administration), while women more frequently attain elite positions through cross-sector mobility, strategically timing moves with family commitments and leveraging sector-specific capital. These divergent routes expose persistent structural inequalities, even as women transform mobility—once seen as a liability—into a resource for remaining within the legal elite.

You can find the article here: Gendered patterns in elite legal careers: men ascend through stability, women through mobility | Journal of Professions and Organization | Oxford Academic

We are excited to announce that TAXLAW has just reached an important milestone: our first academic article has been published in Socio-Economic Review!

The article, co-authored by Corentin Durand and Jérôme Pélisse, dives into an underexplored but powerful dynamic in regulatory processes—how professional face-to-face events shape the interpretation and application of law.

Titled “The asymmetrical negotiation of legal certainty: neutral places in taxation law in France”, the paper challenges traditional views of how regulation works. While much research on regulatory capture focuses on lobbying or institutional ties, this study brings attention to a more subtle and pervasive form of influence: the everyday encounters between regulators and regulated parties in professional settings like seminars, conferences, and training sessions.

Drawing from the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, the authors revisit the idea of «neutral places»—spaces where competing actors are supposed to engage on equal footing. But rather than being neutral, the paper argues that these events often function as arenas where dominant actors in the field (especially in tax law) quietly shape the rules of the game.

You can find the article here.

Corentin D. & Pélisse, J. (2025). The asymmetrical negotiation of legal certainty: neutral places in taxation law in France. Socio-Economic Review, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf036

Money professionals: How professionals in economics, finance, tax, and law gain and practice expertise and authority.

Economic power continues to transform our societies in new ways, and professional groups seek authority in the competition for control over ‘money’ in the form of credit, finance, investment, tax, and legal-economic relations. Economists, business lawyers, tax consultants, fund managers and finance managers may all be considered money professionals mobilising expertise and organisational resources to gain authority and influence distribution of resources. Their relationships underpin who is permitted access to money in the form of credit and debt (Simmel, 1978; Muldrew, 1998; Ingham, 2004). There are a range of researchers interested in these money professionals although they work in research streams and are often not aware of each other. There are researchers within economic sociology, the sociology of professions, sociology of expertise, sociology of law, sociology of money, sociology of the state—as well as researchers in political economy or public administration—that study professional groups working with ‘money’. These scholars may use quantitative or qualitative approaches of various sorts, different theoretical approaches, but have in common an interest in understanding how such money professionals operate, how they interact with or distinguish from other professional groups, what kind of authority they mobilise, or the ways in which they exert power in society.

With this JPO special issue, we wish to foster a dialogue across sub-fields, as well as across methodological and theoretical approaches, to get betters insight into the role and power of professionals or experts working with ‘money’, broadly conceived. We consider a variety of approaches to money professionals as a fruitful ground for questioning and developing theories of professions and organizations, especially given challenges like rising global and workplace inequalities (Ashley et al., 2023). By calling for contributions from researchers from such a diversity of backgrounds, we seek a better understanding of questions such as:

• What are the sources of authority that allows money professionals to exert influence and control?
• How do jurisdictional struggles play out among those working with money?
• How do professional logics play out in internationalised or transnationalized areas such as finance, business law, wealth management or tax counselling? 
• To what extent do we need to develop theories of professions to grasp the struggles over influence and privilege in these areas?
• What is the role of national professional institutions and organizations in a globalised economy?
• What can studies of professionals working with money teach us about the relationship between public and private sector, or between political and economic power?

Whereas studies of expertise, in particular within the field of political science, have often focused on the role of experts in the state apparatus and the shaping and implementation of policies, recent work in the sociology of professions and economic sociology has shed new light on the role of new types of experts within finance (Benquet et al., 2020; Boussard, 2018; Siebert et al., 2020). New light has been shed on professionals or experts operating in international arenas and thus challenging traditional forms of organisation and power exertion (Seabrooke, 2014; Harrington, 2015; Harrington and Seabrooke, 2020), as well as the role of global professional service firms in coordinating both ‘internal’ professional and ‘external’ geopolitical interests (Whittle et al., 2016; Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019; Taminiau et al., 2019; Christensen and Seabrooke, 2022).

Furthermore, whereas some research networks focus on legal professionals and the specificities of their organisations and practices, other networks focus on the role of economists in public administration (Angeletti, 2021; Christensen and Mandelkern, 2022; Fourcade, 2009), as well as other forms of expertise that yield authority in the state apparatus (Mangset, 2015; Mangset and Asdal, 2019). In the world of money, things often change quickly: new products appear, and new groups of professionals or experts compete to be perceived as the legitimate managers of those products (St-Pierre, 2019); professionals compete to capture both clients and regulators (Dinovitzer et al., 2014); new relationships between the public and the private sector (Angeletti and Lemoine, 2021; Vauchez and France, 2021); and new needs for regulation and control are identified. Understanding new legal tools, rising groups of legal professionals and new entanglements of legal and economic expertise are also key to understanding power relations in contemporary societies (Dezalay and Garth, 2016; Pistor, 2019; Avril, 2020; Haagensen, 2023). New occupations, new possibilities to influence administrative and political practices are revealed.

The world of money professionals poses new questions on how to delimit professional groups and forms of expertise, not only due to some of these groups’ supranational fields of practice. Such questions are key to the sociology of professions, be it inspired by functionalism, interactionism, neo-Weberian, Marxist, or those focusing on jurisdictional competition and ‘linked ecologies’ (Abbott, 1988; Abbott, 2005; Fourcade and Khurana, 2013; Seabrooke and Tsingou, 2015). As these professional groups’ areas of practice, their competences, the relevant educational paths are often difficult to delimitate, they offer a good case to reflect on how a professional group constructs itself, develop and maintain their place in a broader landscape, and on whether the analytical tools that we already have are sufficient to understand them (for notable exceptions see, among others, Ellersgaard et al., 2013; Kipping et al., 2019; Bühlmann et al., 2023). For example, we may ask: do money professionals share knowledge, practice, authority, responsibility, or influences that could contribute to constitute something like a professional community across countries? What can we learn from national professional projects that deviate from transnational trends? (Maestripieri, 2019). Comparing similar professional groups across different contexts may also reveal a need for new concepts to grasp these groups’ role in society (Fourcade, 2009; Polillo, 2013).

Bringing these different approaches together opens new opportunities to study the relationship between the state and the market, or between public and private interests. The money professionals under study are key actors in structuring that relationship, and by studying their practices we can reach a more nuanced understanding of what kind of oppositions and concurrences that characterise it.

Whereas the relationship between international and national frameworks are quite central in the field of tax (Belal et al., 2017; Radcliffe et al., 2018), professionals in finance tend to operate more at the international level (Tsingou, 2015; Boussard, 2018). This is also true for larger part of private law firms (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2008). Recent work in sociology of professions and economic sociology focus on the tools, devices, and practices of finance professionals, and how they contribute to boundary drawing, constructing jurisdictions and build authority (Boussard, 2018; Francis, 2020; Cross and Swart, 2021; Köktener and Tunçalp, 2021; Kranke, 2022). Boundary making also include the defence or re-legitimation of professional judgement (Suddaby et al., 2019; Apkarian, 2024). The sociology of professions has often focused on the national level, and the regulations and forms of influence that take place at that level. By focusing on how professionals operate at international levels, scholars have had to introduce new analytical approaches to understand possibilities, strategies, and constraints in a market not that regulated by states. As several money professionals, and indeed tax professionals, still operate in a rather nationally regulated context, it is interesting to ask/discuss whether some of the analytical tools employed in the study of international finance professionals would be fruitful to transpose to a national context, and vice-versa. There is also a research gap in cross-national studies of expert or professional groups, and we would welcome comparative perspectives that could contribute to develop the analytical tools for better grasping the role of national frameworks in a globalized economy.

Within expertise studies, several scholars have focused on economists, and indeed on how much power they have, in particular, within the state apparatus (Christensen and Mandelkern, 2022). However, there is still need for research that studies how economists work in practice, and how they exert their influence across different institutional and national contexts (Henriksen et al., 2022). There is also need for more work on how economists compete with – or work in concordance with – other expert groups within the state apparatus. Are there any other expert groups that contradict them, or are they always supported? (Golka and van der Zwan, 2022; James and Quaglia, 2022). And, when in competition with other expert groups, such as legal professionals, do the economists always win? (Fourcade et al., 2015).

Not only within the state apparatus, but also in the private sector, the role of legal professionals would gain from being studied in new ways. The traditional sociology of professions held up legal professionals as one of their key examples, together with medicine (Halliday, 1985), but we need more detail on what legal expertise is in the domain of money, business, and taxes (for example, in Lazega, 2001; Robé, 2020; Zhu et al., 2020). We also need to understand better how legal professionals operate in a more internationalised context – both in the private and the public sector.

In this special issue, we wish to bring together scholars interested in empirically well-founded and theoretically developing scholarship on professionals working with money in different institutional contexts and different fields of expertise. We welcome contributions that address these themes from various angles and using a variety of data (e.g. quantitative, interviews, ethnographies, document studies, social network analysis, content analysis, prosopographic data). For example, questions of boundaries, between public and private, between distinct professional groups with similar or potentially overlapping jurisdictions, or, on the contrary, between experts in the same field but with a priori opposed interests or from distinct disciplines around the «money» object (in the field of law, economics, finance) could be addressed.

Timeline

August 15 2024 – deadline for 250 word abstracts to be sent to Marte Mangset (marte.mangset@sosgeo.uio.no) and Len Seabrooke (lse.ioa@cbs.dk).

September 15 2024 —Mangset and Seabrooke will notify the authors who will be invited to submit full submissions.

March 15 2025 — deadline submission of full manuscripts.

See the full call (with references) at the Journal of Professions and Organization’s webpage: Call for papers for a special issue of Journal of Professions and Organizations | Journal of Professions and Organization | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

The TAXLAW team welcomes a new member, Jakob Laage-Thomsen, who has received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship grant for his project, JUSTCARBON (Just Carbon Transitions). Jakob started his two-year project in February 2024.

Head of the TAXLAW-team, Marte Mangset, is Jakob’s supervisor. Like her, Jakob will be working from the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Additionally, assistant Professor Johan Christensen, at the Institute of Public Administration (IPA), Leiden University, will also supervise the project.

Jakob’s project investigates contemporary policy processes around expansions of carbon tax systems and their implementation in national legal jurisdictions, and its effects on the professional organization of legal expertise.

As carbon taxes (taxes on Greenhouse Gas Emissions [GhGe]) are set to extend in depth with tariff increases and expand in scope beyond core industries and with fewer exceptions, it will be critical to follow them from policymaking to implementation.  This project aims to investigate the role of legal experts in translating models of economically efficient greenhouse gas emissions taxation into operational tax systems and implementing them in national legal jurisdictions. Through a comparison of three European countries with different energy-industrial composition – Denmark, Norway and France – the study will give us new insights into the implementation and operation of policies deemed central to a just and effective transition.

The study will combine methods from the sociology of professions and expertise and public administration by relying on a mapping of national professional structures, interviews with experts in and outside the public sector and policy discourse analysis. The study thus places itself in a sociological tradition of investigating the relationship between expertise and politics as drivers of societal change.

The project focuses on three main aspects of carbon taxation: first a ‘mapping’ of the professional structure of ‘green tax expertise’, focusing on what professional work is associated with the establishment of carbon tax systems, and which groups are claiming this work in the private and public sector. Second, how these changes impact the expertise and organisation of existing corporate tax lawyers. Third, how the current policy processes around the expansion in scope of carbon tax systems (as for example in the cases of agriculture, carbon capture and firm excemptions) are impacted and seen by different legal expert groups.

JUSTCARBON is funded by the European union.

The TAXLAW team organised a paper workshop on Money Professionals at the Centre Universitaire Norvégien de Paris/Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, France, from March 11^th to 13^th.

Over the past few years, we have buildt a network of researchers whose work inspires us and who we believe can develop new insights and promising research avenues by discussing their work within the framework of the topic Money Professionals. These researchers come from a range of fields and use different theoretical and methodological approaches. However, they share a commonality in contributing new insights into the roles and influence of professionals or experts who work with money.

We held our first workshop on Money Professionals in Paris in June 2022, and another in Oslo in October 2022. This year, we followed up with a new workshop in Paris to consolidate and expand our network.

In addition to the TAXLAW team members Marte Mangset, Len Seabrooke, Jérôme Pélisse, Corentin Durand, Helle Dyrendahl Staven, and Jakob Laage-Thomasen, the workshop participants included Lola Avril (School of Law, University of Eastern Finland), Johan Christensen (Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University), Maj Grasten (Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School), Benjamin Lemoine (Centre Maurice Halbwachs, CNRS), Saila Stausholm (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Alexandra Bahary-Dionne (Centre de sociologie des organisations, Sciences Po), Antoine Costes (IDHES, Nanterre University), and Nathan Darras (IDHES, Nanterre University).

Studies presented at the workshop fell under the themes of legal expertise and political influence, the interface of legal expertise between the state and the market, and professional networks. These were both work in progress and more finished texts, with a variation of theoretical perspectives and a variety of data.

From the TAXLAW team, Helle and Marte presented a paper on the autonomy and authority of academic expertise in the field of tax law. Marte and Len presented a work in progress on the revolving doors phenomenon in French tax law, while Jérôme and Corentin presented a paper on neutral spaces.

The workshop was a beneficial experience, facilitating meaningful exchanges on the research topic of money professionals. The participants, coming from varied perspectives, contributed to useful discussions that aided in the development of our collective research. Overall, the workshop was an engaging event that supported our ongoing study in this important area.

On October 26-27, the TAXLAW team and the Centre for the Study of Professions at OsloMet organised the workshop Money Professionals. How professionals in economics, finance, tax and law gain and practice expertise and authority.

Researchers from different countries and institutions were invited to a two-day workshop at Lysebu hotel in Oslo, Norway. In addition to the TAXLAW team, the participants were Lola Avril (European University Institute), Karen Boll (Dept. of Organization, Copenhagen Business School), Rasmus Corlin Christensen (Dept. of Organization, Copenhagen Business School), Valérie Boussard (Dept. of Sociology, Nanterre University), Pascale Cornut-St Pierre (Dept. of Civil Law, University of Ottawa), Daniel Muzio (School for Business and Society, University of York), Jean-Philippe Robé (Sciences Po Law School), Saila Stausholm (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Silje M. Tellmann (Dept. of Business, History and Social Sciences, University of South-Eastern Norway), Giorgio Norlemann Baldari (Centre for the Study of Professions/OsloMet) and Kristin Vikan Sjurgard (Centre for the Study of Professions/OsloMet).

A wide range of studies was presented, all empirically well-founded and theoretically developing scholarship on professionals working with money in different institutional contexts and fields of expertise.

Sociology of the professions, sociology of expertise, sociology of law, sociology of the state and economic sociology approach the power of experts in different ways. In this workshop, we aimed at combining questions and knowledge from these different fields to gain new insight into the role of experts in society. The presentations were works in progress that addressed these themes from various angles and using a variety of data (e.g. quantitative, interviews, ethnographies, and document studies).

From the TAXLAW team, Corentin and Marte presented a paper on the relationship between the tax law expertise of the French state and the private sector, Jérôme and Corentin presented a paper on neutral spaces and cross-sectorial expertise within tax law in France, and Len and Helle presented a paper on gender barriers and career mobility among Norwegian tax lawyers.

The organisation of the workshop was part of our aim of building a research network of social scientists who study professions working within the fields of tax, economy, law, and finance in different contexts. The workshop was very enjoyable and academically stimulating, and this network will be an important research community for TAXLAW in the years to come.