Jodi L. Short

Codes in Context: How States, Markets, and Civil Society Shape Adherence to Global Labor Standards

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Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing?

Regulatory agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether voluntary self-reporting can reliably indicate effective self-policing efforts that might provide opportunities for enforcement efficiencies. We find that regulators used self-reports of legal violations as a heuristic for identifying firms that are effectively policing their own operations, shifting enforcement resources away from those that voluntarily disclose. We also find that these firms that voluntarily disclosed regulatory violations and committed to self-policing improved their regulatory compliance and environmental performance, which suggests that the enforcement relief they received was warranted. Collectively, our results suggest that self-reporting can be a useful tool for reliably identifying and leveraging the voluntary self-policing efforts of regulated companies.

Self-Regulation in the Regulatory Void “Blue Moon”or “Bad Moon”?

Corporate self-regulation has been blamed for many of the worst environmental and financial catastrophes of the twenty-first century, but the failure of self-regulation in these catastrophes has been rivaled by failures of government regulation. This article explores the consequences of adopting self-regulation under conditions of failed or deficient government regulation. First, it identifies the conditions that produce the phenomenon of “blue moon” self-regulation, or self-regulation that successfully achieves public regulatory goals. Second, it develops a typology of regulatory voids in which self-regulation is commonly adopted and analyzes its prospects for success under each set of conditions. It concludes that prospects for self-regulatory success are particularly bleak in regulatory voids that have been created by the concerted political opposition of regulated entities.

Beyond Symbolic Responses to Private Politics: Examining Labor Standards Improvement in Global Supply Chains

Worker rights advocates seeking to improve labor conditions in global supply chains have engaged in activism that led transnational corporations to adopt codes of conduct and monitor their suppliers for compliance, but it is not clear whether these organizational structures raise labor standards. Drawing on thousands of audits conducted by a major social auditor, we identify structural contingencies in the institutional environment and in program design under which codes and monitoring are more likely to be associated with improvements in working conditions. At the institutional level, suppliers improve more when they face greater exposure risk and when their buyers are more sensitive to such exposure. At the program design level, suppliers improve more when the monitoring regime signals a cooperative approach, when auditors are highly trained, and especially when both of these elements are present. These findings should inform monitoring strategies aimed at improving working conditions in global supply chains.Worker rights advocates seeking to improve labor conditions in global supply chains have engaged in private political strategies prompting transnational corporations (TNCs) to adopt codes of conduct and monitor their suppliers for compliance, but it is not clear whether organizational structures established by TNCs to protect their reputations can actually raise labor standards. We extend the literature on private politics and organizational self-regulation by identifying several conditions under which codes and monitoring are more likely to be associated with improvements in supply chain working conditions. We find that suppliers are more likely to improve when they face external compliance pressure in their domestic institutional environment, when their buyers take a cooperative approach to monitoring, and when their auditors are highly trained. We find, further, that a cooperative approach to monitoring enhances the impact of auditor training, and that auditor training has a greater impact on improvement when coupled with a cooperative approach than with external compliance pressures. These findings suggest key considerations that should inform the design and implementation of monitoring strategies aimed at improving conditions in global supply chains as well as theory and empirical research on the organizational outcomes of private political activism for social change.

The Causes and Consequences of Industry Self-Policing

Innovative regulatory programs are encouraging firms to police their own regulatory compliance and voluntarily disclose, or confess, the violations they find. Despite the win-win rhetoric surrounding these government voluntary programs, it is not clear why companies would participate and whether the programs themselves do anything to enhance regulatory effectiveness. Tasked with monitoring the legality of its own operations, why would a firm that identifies violations turn itself in to regulators rather than quietly fix the problem? And why would regulators entrust regulated entities to monitor their own compliance and enforce the law against themselves? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the factors that lead organizations to self-disclose violations, the effects of self-policing on regulatory compliance, and the effects of self-disclosing on the relationship between regulators and regulated firms. We investigate these research questions in the context of the US Environmental Protection Agencys Audit Policy.