Christine Parker

Mixed Motives: Economic, Social, and Normative Motivations in Business Compliance

This article develops theoretical understanding of the motives of business firms and their managers for compliance. First, we develop a typology to conceptualize and measure business motives relevant to compliance behavior. We distinguish between three categories of motives: economic, social, and normative. We hypothesize, however, that business firms and their managers do not divide into types motivated exclusively by singular priorities. We expect each firm to hold a constellation of plural motives. Moreover, we expect that economic and social motives are more alike between regulatees within the same regulatory regime than normative motives. Second, we conduct a preliminary test of the plausibility of our typology of motives and our theory of constellations of plural motives using data from a survey of the thousand biggest companies in Australia. Finally, we conclude that the path from fundamental interests or motives to behavior is filled with constraints and contingent factors at the individual, organizational, and structural levels.

Compliance Professionalism and Regulatory Community: The Australian Trade Practices Regime

Contemporary state governance relies increasingly on regulatory strategies encouraging self-regulation and compliance for corporate regulation. This paper examines the conditions in which such strategies might be effective by reference to the Australian trade practices regime. The paper argues that regulators will only use compliance strategies effectively when (i) a community of compliance professionals with both professional integrity and commercial ‘street’ credibility exists to make compliance come alive in everyday corporate activities, and (ii) regulators invest in meta-evaluation of compliance professionals’ activities.

Reinventing Regulation within the Corporation Compliance-Oriented Regulatory Innovation

Compliance-oriented regulation should be understood as a holistic approach to regulatory design, implementation, monitoring, and enforcement in which the guiding principle is the achievement of regulatory outcomes. Compliance-oriented regulation is therefore distinctively concerned with the effects of public regulation in preexistent regulatory space where it must compete with private normative orderings. This article sets out the principles of compliance-oriented regulatory innovation together with evidence on their effectiveness. The widespread implementation of in-house corporate compliance systems in recent years means that compliance-oriented regulators need to be particularly concerned with nurturing compliance capacity among regulatees, fostering regulatory community through compliance professionalism, and developing standards for corporate compliance functions.

Corporate Compliance Systems Could They Make Any Difference

This article critically appraises the potential of corporate compliance systems to influence corporate behavior. The authors differentiate between the adoption of formal compliance management systems and the way compliance is managed in practice in business organizations by reference to scholarly literature and analysis of survey responses from 999 large Australian businesses about their implementation of competition and consumer protection law compliance systems. Their analysis shows that at least some elements of compliance systems can translate into good management of compliance in practice. But management commitment to compliance values, managerial oversight and planning, and organizational resources are just as important.

Inside Lawyers' Ethics

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Voting with Your Fork? Industrial Free-Range Eggs and the Regulatory Construction of Consumer Choice

Labeling and information disclosure to support consumer choice are often proposed as attractive policy alternatives to onerous mandatory business regulation. This article argues that choices available to consumers are constructed and constrained by actors in the chains of production, distribution, and exchange who bring products to retail. It traces how “free-range” eggs come to market in Australia, finding that the “industrial free-range” label dominating the market is not substantially different from caged-egg production in the way that it addresses animal welfare, public health, and agro-ecological values. I show how the product choices available to consumers have been constructed not just by the regulation (or nonregulation) of marketing and labeling, but also by the regulatory paths taken and not taken all along the food chain.

How to Win Hearts and Minds: Corporate Compliance Policies for Sexual Harassment

Australian law provides incentives and encouragement for companies to develop their own sexual harassment policies. This paper reports on interviews with equal opportunity officers in Australia’s financial services industry responsible for best practice sexual harassment policies. Their experiences evoke three scholarly critiques of corporate compliance as a regulatory strategy: (1) that corporate compliance programs are a means by which employees’ lives are regimented and controlled by corporate governmentality, (2) or, even worse, that private management priorities subvert the principles of public-regarding law while appearing to implement them, and (3) that even where law has some effect, regulatory strategies aimed at producing self-regulatory compliance will provide insufficient deterrence to effect real change. The data however also show that the best of these best practice officers have themselves created complex strategies to resolve tensions between law and management, corporate goals, and normative pressures. In doing so, they have had to combine their personal, professional, and corporate commitments to “win hearts and minds” to antiharassment values by co-opting management resources to compliance goals through strategic appeals to both “business case” arguments and the specter of public sanctions. This project of cooption depends on their own position and “clout” within the corporation.

Converting the lawyers: the dynamics of competition and accountability reform

The success of competition and accountability reform to the Australian legal profession is found to be as dependent on the process by which it is introduced as on its substantive merits. A diversity of opinions on, and experiences of, reform proposals was gathered through interviews with forty-one lawyers selected by the difference discovery method. Their varied responses to reform were analysed using the constant comparative method and placed into two broad categories: (a) conversion stories based on community responsiveness, persuasive dialogue, discovery of self-interest, pragmatic acceptance of fate and surrender to market forces; and (b) defiance stories induced by discredit and disrespect. It was found that individual lawyers and professional associ ations have responded constructively to persuasion and dialogue especially when they also see reform as inevitable. They have resisted when change is introduced in a way that denies them a role in their own regulation and reform.

The Happy Hen on Your Supermarket Shelf: What Choice Does Industrial Strength Free Range Represent for Consumers?

This paper investigates what “free-range” eggs are available for sale in supermarkets in Australia, what “free-range” means on product labelling, and what alternative “free-range” offers to cage production. The paper concludes that most of the “free-range” eggs currently available in supermarkets do not address animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health concerns but, rather, seek to drive down consumer expectations of what these issues mean by balancing them against commercial interests. This suits both supermarkets and egg producers because it does not challenge dominant industrial-scale egg production and the profits associated with it. A serious approach to free-range would confront these arrangements, and this means it may be impossible to truthfully label many of the “free-range” eggs currently available in the dominant supermarkets as free-range.

Internal Corporate Compliance Management Systems: Structure, Culture and Agency

Since the 1970s a number of influential regulatory scholars have suggested that it ought to be possible to empirically identify internal management structures, decision making processes, employee training and other practices that can effectively prevent misconduct in corporations. Moreover, it has been suggested that it should be possible to design government or voluntary regulatory programs that would force or encourage corporations to self-regulate by putting in place these corporate compliance management systems. In this contribution to the edited collection, Explaining Compliance (Parker and Nielsen eds), we briefly describe the main empirical research questions regarding corporate compliance management systems that scholarly regulation literature attempts to answer. These questions concern the extent to which corporations actually do implement compliance systems, why they do so, and what impact, if any, these systems have on compliance behavior. We suggest that in order to answer these questions, it is useful to use the generic sociological concepts of structure, culture and agency. That is, it is important to study the interaction between the adoption of formal systems for compliance management (one component of structure), the perceptions, motivations and strategies of individuals within the corporation in relation to compliance (agency), and the local norms and habituated practices (culture or cultures) that mediate between corporate structures and individual agency. We summarise our own qualitative in depth interview studies of large organizations’ implementation of compliance management systems and other empirical literature on corporate compliance management systems to show how structure and agency interact through culture at three nodes: top management decisions to implement a compliance system; the compliance strategies of specialised compliance managers; and, the ways in which compliance systems are communicated to and experienced by individual employees. The paper concludes by summarizing a preliminary attempt to more systematically identify and test structure, agency and culture in compliance system implementation, and their effects.