What Is Compliance? How Audits Change Ethics and Organizational Fields

Abstract

In 1995, Sarah Babb was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the Department of Sociology. She had recently arrived in Mexico City for dissertation research on economic planning and had never heard of an Institutional Review Board (IRB). In 2017, in the waning days of the Obama Administration, the federal government announced the first major overhaul of human-subjects regulation in more than four decades. In the years between her dissertation research and the regulatory overhaul, Babb was hired at Boston College, promoted through to full professor, and tasked with chairing the college’s own IRB—the local iteration of the peculiar, pervasive, and mostly reviled American structure mandated by federal regulations. Babb’s aim in the brisk, smart new book Regulating Human Research: IRBs from Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy is to characterize the period when IRBs went from being a vague notion in the lives of most social scientists to an active presence that was impossible to miss. The book is about how IRBs came to be oriented toward regulatory compliance rather than toward ethically protecting research participants, as they were imagined in their earliest, most righteous (and hopeful) moments. It joins a shelf of books that document and explain precisely why the U.S. administrative state has been incapable of supporting thick public discussions and decision-making practices around moral questions. Those books have come from either economic and organizational sociologists (such as Wendy Espeland, Carol Heimer, Sarah Quinn, and Viviana Zelizer) or from sociologists of science, including John Evans, Sheila Jasanoff, Shobita Parthasarathy, and Stefan Sperling. Babb’s book cross-indexes to each of these subfields, as well as to medical sociology and research methods, making it broadly relevant for the field of sociology. (Pick Chapter Five for a quick, current take on IRBs to assign in a methods course.) In 1974, the U.S. Congress passed the National Research Act on the heels of public revelations about the horrific Tuskegee Syphilis Studies—long-standing, governmentfunded, racist research on African American men in Alabama. Researchers’ abuses had been going on for decades, but they were exposed at that historical moment because of the (alas, incomplete) successes of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The revelations were an occasion for high-ranking federal bureaucrats to lift the U.S. government’s own internal research review system to the law of the land. The government’s aim was Regulating Human Research: IRBs from Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy, by Sarah Babb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 184 pp. $22.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503611221.