John Braithwaite

Global Business Regulation

Across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation - from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labour standards, drugs, food, transport and environment - this book confronts the question of how the regulation of business has shifted from national to global institutions. Based on interviews with 500 international leaders in business and government, this book examines the role played by global institutions such as the WTO, the OECD, IMF, Moodys and the World Bank, as well as various NGOs and significant individuals. The authors argue that effective and decent global regulation depends on the determination of individuals to engage with powerful agendas and decision-making bodies that would otherwise be dominated by concentrated economic interests. This book will become a standard reference for readers in business, law, politics and international relations.

Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts

For informal justice to be restorative justice, it has to be about restoring victims, restoring offenders, and restoring communities as a result of participation of a plurality of stakeholders. This means that victim-offender mediation, healing circles, family group conferences, restorative probation, reparation boards on the Vermont model, whole school antibullying programs, Chinese Bang Jiao programs, and exit conferences following Western business regulatory inspections can at times all be restorative justice. Sets of both optimistic propositions and pessimistic claims can be made about restorative justice by contemplating the global diversity of its practice. Examination of both the optimistic and the pessimistic propositions sheds light on prospects for restorative justice. Regulatory theory (a responsive regulatory pyramid) may be more useful for preventing crime in a normatively acceptable way than existing criminal law jurisprudence and explanatory theory. Evidence-based reform must move toward a more productive checking of restorative justice by liberal legalism, and vice versa.

The Myth of Social Class and Criminality Reconsidered

Four recent contributions to ASR on the relationship between social class and criminality are evaluated against a more comprehensive review of the evidence. It is concluded that class is one of the very few correlates of criminality which can be taken, on balance, as persuasively supported by a large body of empirical evidence. Self-report studies, however, fail to provide consistent support for a class-crime relationship. Yet even here more studies show significant class differences than would be expected on the basis of chance. Studies of official records consistently show notable class differences in criminality. While there is a considerable literature which has failed to demonstrate widespread class biases in official records, there is neglected evidence which suggests that self-reports exaggerate the proportion of delinquency committed by the middle class. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1981. Copyright

The Dialectics of Corporate Deterrence

Panel data fail to support a subjective expected utility model of corporate deterrence. There is partial confirmation, however, that chief executives of small organizations who perceive the certainty of detection as high have better regulatory compliance in their organizations. Perceived sanction threats do not work significantly more effectively for chief executives (a) of for-profit versus nonprofit organizations; (b) who are owners as well as managers; (c) who say they think about sanctions more (sanction salience); and (d) who have a weaker belief in the law. Nor does the effectiveness of corporate deterrents depend on compliance costs. There is, however, a significant deterrent effect for managers who are low on emotionality, but an opposite counter-deterrent effect for actors high on emotionality. This supports the critique of those who condemn rational actor models from a sociology of the emotions perspective. Emotions of guilt among managers predict the subsequent compliance of their organizations. The results are consistent with perceptual deterrent studies of individuals that find little effect of formal sanctions and social disapproval as deterrents, but stronger support for an effect of self-disapproval (guilt or shame) on law observance. Qualitative data are used to show why it would be folly to interpret these results as showing that business regulation can work without sanction threats and social disapproval. Rather, the data evince the need for a complete reconceptionalization of the way policy analysts think about the deterrence of law breaking.

Trust and compliance

When regulatory inspectors trust industry, is this trust abused in a way that reduces regulatory compliance? Or does trust foster the internalization of regulatory objectives by regulated managers? Does trust build goodwill that translates into improved voluntary compliance? Data on compliance by Australian nursing homes with quality of care standards supports the latter interpretation. Nursing homes experience improved compliance after regulatory encounters in which facility managers believe that they have been treated as trustworthy. This finding commends a dynamic regulatory strategy of dialogue and trust as a first choice followed by escalation to more punitive regulation when trust is abused. Responsive versus static regulatory strategies and communitarian versus hierarchical fiduciary conceptions of guardianship are advanced as implications for resolving the dilemmas of trust and compliance.

In and Out of the Revolving Door: Making Sense of Regulatory Capture

The concept of regulatory capture is multidimensional according to data from Australian nursing home inspectors. There are three empirically distinct forms of capture: identification with the industry, sympathy with the particular problems that regulated firms confront in meeting standards, and absence of toughness. Inspectors who have prior senior management experience in the industry tend to be less tough in their attitudes to regulatory enforcement. For the other two types of capture, it is not coming in the revolving door (from an industry job), but aspirations to go out of the revolving door (to an industry job) that predicts capture. Captured regulatory attitudes and revolving door variables have little power, however, in explaining the toughness of actual enforcement practices. We do find that over time tougher inspectors are more likely to leave the regulatory agency than softer inspectors. These data are used to inform a policy analysis of capture and corruption. It is concluded that there is limited analytical merit in a conception of capture as an enduring unitary character trait that is structurally determined by a history of interest group affiliations. Capture, we attempt to show, is instead a situational problem that requires situational solutions. Constraining the free movement of the revolving door by restricting regulatory appointments from or to the regulated industry is an example of a flawed policy grounded in an overdrawn structural determinism.

Regulating Aged Care

This book is a major contribution to regulatory theory from three members of the world-class regulatory research group based in Australia. It marks a new development in responsive regulatory theory in which a strengths-based pyramid complements the regulatory pyramid.

Emotional dynamics in restorative conferences

Restorative justice interventions, which focus upon repairing the harm caused by an offence, are consistent with the approach advocated by reintegrative shaming theory. However, some have argued that remorse and empathy play a more important role in restoration, and that a focus upon disapproval and the emotion of shame may be misguided. This article analyses theoretical distinctions between shame and guilt before discussing their role in restorative interventions. It is argued that emotions like empathy, remorse and guilt will spill over into feelings of shame, and that it is the resolution of these emotions that is critical for successful justice interventions.

On Theory and Action for Corporate Crime Control

The recent surge of governmental and scholarly interest in corporate crime seems likely to end or to slow down considerably under the Reagan administration. This paper examines six propositions jointly suggesting that corporate crime represents a more feasible and signifi cant crime control target than traditional crime. It is argued that the discredited doctrines of crime control by public disgrace, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation can be successfully applied to cor porate crime. This would be particularly true if the implications of our propositions were to form the basis for alterations in criminal law and criminal procedure.

Unemployment and Crime: Toward Resolving the Paradox

While official crime statistics from many countries show that unemployed people have high crime rates and that communities with a lot of unemployment experience a lot of crime, this cross-sectional relationship is very often not found in time-series studies of unemployment and crime. In Australia there have been no individual-level or cross-sectional studies of unemployment and adult crime which have failed to find a positive relationship and no time-series which have supported a positive relationship. Consistent with this pattern, a time series of homicide from 1921 to 1987 in Australia reveals no significant unemployment effect. A theoretical resolution of this apparent paradox is advanced in terms of the effect of female employment on crime in a partriarchal society. Crime is posited as a function of both total unemployment and female employment. When female employment is added to the model, it has a strong positive effect on homicide, and unemployment also assumes a strong positive effect.