Organizational Challenges to Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance: A New Common Sense about Regulation

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, following an escalating series of global financial and economic crises, we hear renewed calls for government regulation as a necessary, if not entirely sufficient, safeguard against the excesses of exuberant capitalism. At the same time as some policy advocates urge increased regulation, opponents claim that it is not capitalism nor the market that is the cause of these crises; instead, they argue, government regulation not only dampens market efficiencies and retards economic growth but encourages the predatory and fraudulent practices responsible for the recent Great Recession

J. Locke, Op. Cit.: Invocations of Law on Snowy Streets

Each winter in the northern cities of the United States, a familiar scene illustrates tacit and deeply sedimented, yet common invocations of law. After a heavy snow storm, one can see old chairs, traffic cones, milk crates, light weight tables, dead house plants, or other noticeably bulky objects in recently shoveled out parking spots on an otherwise snow-filled public street. “Before snowfalls, a parking space belongs to the one who occupies it: you leave it, you lose it. In wintertime Chicago, however,” writes Fred McChesney in an economic analysis of this practice, “excavating one’s car [from the snow that fell on it] changes the system of property rights... The initial digger of the spot is given a limited monopoly for its use.” Although calculating an efficient duration for the monopoly preoccupies some analysts, my attention to the practice of claiming parking spots on snowy streets derives from an interest in understanding legal culture, more specifically, how practices of everyday life sustain the rule of law

Emperor\u27s New Clothes: Mediation Mythology and Markets, The

The Emperor\u27s New Clothes is a very modem tale about carving out market niches, about generating and feeding unreasonable desires, and about the power of conformity within emergent occupations and powerful professions

Constructing Consequences for Noncompliance: The Case of Academic Laboratories

We examine academic research laboratories as examples of intractable governance sites. These spaces often elude regulatory warnings and rules because of the professional status of faculty members, the opacity of scientific work to outsiders, and loose coupling of policy and practice in organizations. We describe one university’s efforts to create a system for managing laboratory health, safety, and environmental hazards, thereby constraining conventional faculty habit to ignore administrative and legal procedures. We demonstrate the specific struggles safety managers face in creating system responsiveness, that is, feedback to re-channel noncompliant laboratory practices. We show how faculty members are buffered from the consequences of their activities, thus impeding the goals of responsibility and accountability. We conclude by asking where such pockets of intractability reside in other organizations and whether the surrounding buffer, if there is one, may nonetheless paradoxically create an effective margin of safety.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0216815)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0518118)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0535870

Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations’ behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance

Efficient energy transfer in light-harvesting systems, I: optimal temperature, reorganization energy, and spatial-temporal correlations

Understanding the mechanisms of efficient and robust energy transfer in light-harvesting systems provides new insights for the optimal design of artificial systems. In this paper, we use the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein complex and phycocyanin 645 (PC 645) to explore the general dependence on physical parameters that help maximize the efficiency and maintain its stability. With the Haken-Strobl model, the maximal energy transfer efficiency (ETE) is achieved under an intermediate optimal value of dephasing rate. To avoid the infinite temperature assumption in the Haken-Strobl model and the failure of the Redfield equation in predicting the Forster rate behavior, we use the generalized Bloch-Redfield (GBR) equation approach to correctly describe dissipative exciton dynamics and find that maximal ETE can be achieved under various physical conditions, including temperature, reorganization energy, and spatial-temporal correlations in noise. We also identify regimes of reorganization energy where the ETE changes monotonically with temperature or spatial correlation and therefore cannot be optimized with respect to these two variables