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Gray, Garry C.; Silbey, Susan S. --- "The Other Side of the Compliance Relationship" [2011] ELECD 936; in Parker, Christine; Nielsen, Lehmann Vibeke (eds), "Explaining Compliance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Explaining Compliance

Editor(s): Parker, Christine; Nielsen, Lehmann Vibeke

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448858

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: The Other Side of the Compliance Relationship

Author(s): Gray, Garry C.; Silbey, Susan S.

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

6. The other side of the compliance
relationship
Garry C. Gray and Susan S. Silbey*

INTRODUCTION

Regulation research has traditionally been premised upon the regulator's
view of the regulated. When research does examine `the other side of the
compliance relationship,' it is often limited to the interactions between
regulators and high level figures inside organizations (for example upper
level management or a designated company compliance officer). By focus-
ing on the role of the regulator in achieving regulatory effectiveness,
researchers, inadvertently we presume, have given less attention to the
contributions of middle and ground level workers to organizational com-
pliance. Attending to the formal agents of law, researchers often miss the
most predictable and thus powerful aspects of law and legality: its habitual
quotidian enactment, particularly when the formal agents of law may be
absent and its coercive force less visible (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Silbey
and Cavicchi, 2005).
When designing this chapter and comparing several of our projects,
it became clear that our collective approach to regulation research has
resulted in important findings that are related to the conceptual `flip-
side' of traditional regulatory studies. Some of our key findings directly
or implicitly focus on how individuals within organizations who enact
compliance day-to-day actually interpret and respond to regulation.
Therefore, in this chapter, we recommend research that explores the other
side of the compliance relationship: how the regulated view regulators.
This chapter also represents our conceptual approach for a larger project
that we are currently undertaking ...