Compliance Management Systems: Do They Make a Difference?

Regulatory compliance is vital for promoting the public values served by regulation. Yet many businesses remain out of compliance with some of the regulations that apply to them—presenting not only possible dangers to the public but also exposing themselves to potentially significant liability risk. Compliance management systems (CMSs) may help reduce the likelihood of noncompliance. In recent years, managers have begun using CMSs in an effort to address compliance issues in a variety of domains: environment, workplace health and safety, finance, health care, and aviation, among others. CMSs establish systematic, checklist-like processes by which managers seek to improve their organizations’ compliance with government regulation. They can help managers identify compliance obligations, assign responsibility for meeting them, track progress, and take corrective action as needed. In effect, CMSs constitute firms’ own internal inspection and enforcement responsibilities. At least in theory, CMSs reduce noncompliance by increasing information available to employees and managers, facilitating internal incentives to correct instances of noncompliance once identified, and helping to foster a culture of compliance. Recognizing these potential benefits, some government policymakers and regulators have even started to require certain firms to adopt CMSs.But do CMSs actually achieve their theoretical benefits? We review the available empirical research related to CMSs in an effort to discern how they work, paying particular attention to whether CMSs help firms fulfill both the letter as well as the spirit of the law. We also consider lessons that can be drawn from research on the effectiveness of still broader systems for risk management and corporate codes of ethics, as these systems either include regulatory compliance as one component or they present comparable challenges in terms of internal monitoring and shaping of organizational behavior. Overall, we find evidence that firms with certain types of CMSs in place experience fewer compliance violations and show improvements in risk management. But these effects also appear to be rather modest. Compliance in large organizations generally requires more than just a CMS; it also demands appropriate managerial attitudes, organizational cultures, and information technologies that extend beyond the systematic, checklist processes characteristic of CMSs. We address implications of what we find for policy and future research, especially about the conditions under which CMSs appear to work best, the types or features of CMSs that appear to work better than others, and the possible value of regulatory mandates that firms implement CMSs

Measuring Compliance in the Age of Governance:How the Governance Turn Has Impacted Compliance Measurement by the State

Since the 1980s, the governance of business behavior in Western societies has been characterized by a move away from state-centered hierarchical forms of governance to networks of governance which include a wide variety of public and private actors. This chapter illustrates how this so-called governance turn has impacted compliance measurement by the state. The chapter begins by outlining the characteristics of the turn to governance and the questions this raises for the measurement of compliance by the state. The chapter is subsequently organized around two key issues: 1) What is it that we measure when we measure compliance? and 2) The reliability, magnitude, and ownership of the data used. Drawing on examples of certification and the global anti-money laundering regime, each section discusses how the governance turn has made compliance measurement by regulatory authorities more challenging

The Secession of the Successful: The Rise of Amazon as Private Global Consumer Protection Regulator

In 2005, the Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions (“AFFECT”) coalition issued a list of 12 principles it hoped would contribute to a new consensus about what constitutes fairness in online consumer transactions. A decade later, a cursory review of different jurisdictions indicates that, while there has been little discernable progress in the direction of the principles in the United States, other jurisdictions such as the European Union have made more progress. However, the one jurisdiction in the world that comes closest to implementing all 12 principles across the full spectrum of consumer transactions is not a government at all, but Amazon acting as a private regulator. Amazon’s status as a regulator arises out of its ownership of a “multi-sided platform” that acts as a global retail marketplace. The rise of global platforms such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft that own global online marketplaces and simultaneously act as their primary regulators calls to mind the “Secession of the Successful” described by Robert Reich in 1991—the withdrawal from civil society of the wealthy and powerful into private gated communities. Amazon’s status as the primary de facto regulator of the marketplace it owns combined with its single-minded pursuit of customer satisfaction contributes to relations with its employees and suppliers that are often profoundly problematic. When a platform operator is also the primary regulator of the market it creates, negative spillover effects may occur: squeezing employees and suppliers to insure that consumers get whatever they want merely pushes conflict from one part of the platform “ecosystem” to another. When this occurs, it does not make online commerce fairer overall, which was the implicit goal of the 12 principles. Although transaction-level norms such as those found in the 12 principles cannot ensure that all stakeholders in online marketplaces are treated fairly, other forms of regulation might be more effective in contributing to that goal

Does Gender Diversity in the Workplace Affect Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intentions?

In the present study, we explore the contextual meanings and consequences of workplace diversity. We focus on gender diversity in the workplace and explore its relationship with job satisfaction and turnover intentions among male and female employees. We perform our analyses in a survey data set containing replies from 2,818 employees from 13 different occupations in the Danish public sector. The sample is stratified according to gender and contains equal shares of women and men in each occupation, thus providing good opportunities to estimate the importance of gender diversity for both women and men in widely differing occupational contexts.We define gender diversity as gender heterogeneity in the workplace, which means that workplaces with equal shares of female and male employees have the highest degree of gender diversity, while gender homogenous workplaces have low gender diversity.We choose job satisfaction and turnover intentions as our dependent variables because these variables represent key indicators for the well-being of employees in the workplace. Furthermore, empirical research is unsettled as to the positive or negative relationship between diversity and these variables.We suggest that turnover intentions may not be an unambiguous indicator of organizational dissatisfaction or lack of well-being (as it is often tacitly taken to be). In some contexts, turnover intentions may be an expression of positive career orientations. Intentions to find another job may express an urge to move on, develop, obtain better pay, and so on. An occupational variable may be decisive in capturing the relevant context for determining the meaning of turnover intentions

Valuing labour: The interaction of law and informal norms in UK agriculture

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Specialet som glasloft – hvorfor får mandlige studerende bedre specialekarakterer?

Selvom de mandlige universitetsstuderende ikke klarer sig bedre end kvinderne frem til specialet, får de gennemsnitligt bedre specialekarakterer. Artiklens analyser viser, at det hverken handler om specialevejlederens køn eller om typen af universitetsstudium. Mulige forklaringer, som det er værd for kommende forskning at forfølge, er dels generel diskrimination af kvindelige specialestuderende og dels de studerendes møde med specialet, hvor kønnenes livssituation og/eller deres reaktioner på rollen som specialestuderende kan være forskellige