Härtill 4 uppsatser

Diss. (sammanfattning) Lund : Lunds universitet, 2023

law and legality as it operates and is experienced by aviation professionals in relation to the implementation, application and enforcement of EU civil aviation regulations in different countries in the European aircraft maintenance sector. To do this, the research seeks to increase socio-legal understandings of law and legality in relation to LAMEs’ experiences of the sector-specific regulatory requirements of occurrence reporting, just culture, and releasing aircraft into service. Of particular interest for advancing knowledge is building an understanding of how certifying LAMEs experience the vertical chain of hard and soft law comprising the EU regulations as implemented in national aviation regulatory frameworks and legal systems (hard law) and as applied and complied with by AMOs (soft law). Ultimately, the research aims to understand how LAMEs make law work as they uphold safety and participate in the socio-professional construction of legality in the multi-level regulatory environment framing this EU sector. With consideration of the normative heterogeneous character of aviation safety as a source of professional guidance in the aircraft maintenance sector, the research further explores if and how LAMEs’ experiences of law are shaped by the normative sources with which they are associated. I argue that much can be learned about the normative relationship between safety and law by exploring, through the critical lens of sociology of law, how aviation professionals engage with the different forms and levels of law in the EU civil aviation system as they go about their everyday work tasks. Throughout these tasks, they make law work by making safety work in an institutionalised hegemonic structure of rules where law operates ideologically as a risk and safety management strategy that ultimately supports the EU single market goals and ideals.