This paper seeks to explore the logic and manner of regulating tort situations in daily life. Based on interviews, it seeks to tease some societal sense out of the reactions of individuals faced with such situations. It hypothesizes that informal regulation is neither inconsistent nor amorphous and that, just like formal institutions, it contributes to the organization, facilitation and preservation of societal life and cohesion. The normative principles and the practical methods of regulation found by the research suggest that there is a perception that the cohesion of societal life is being continuously fashioned and renewed due to its conflictive nature, and that the containment of societal life within viable parameters is up to each one of society’s members.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular phenomenon that originates at the margins of the legal system. How do CSR practices interact with the law? With the propagation of CSR instruments, the law struggles to prescribe these procedures while favouring an effective application of codes of conduct. Nevertheless, the motivations behind CSR practices stem primarily from a desire to reduce legal risk rather than from a wish to convey a good corporate image. The legal status of the codes is variable, and the jurisdictions participate in the implementation of these regulatory norms of corporate relations. While these acts are intended to protect the fundamental social rights of workers, they sometimes become new legal tools used to make workers subordinate to the corporate ethic. Is it desirable, then, to propose a legal framework for this purely spontaneous and voluntary social phenomenon?

In Western societies, penal regulation is largely considered the best way to deal with conflicts or, more widely, with trouble. Indeed, penal regulation is seen as one of the most efficient tools for maintaining the cohesion of collective life. However, some research has questioned this efficiency, noting that only a few problematic situations were addressed by the penal system. We can hypothesize, then, that other forms of defining and regulating trouble exist and function outside of any institutional field. The present study develops this hypothesis by analyzing how people experience conflicts in everyday life. In this way, we attempt to discover whether these social modes of identifying trouble still remain and under which conditions this survival is possible.