Julien Etienne

Compliance Theory: A Goal Framing Approach

Despite a wealth of publications on compliance and noncompliance, regulation scholars still lack a consistent and comprehensive compliance theory and entertain a collection of partial and incompatible theories instead. This article is an attempt to improve this situation by taking up two interrelated challenges that compliance theorists are facing: to account for the multiple motivations behind compliance and noncompliance behaviors with one internally consistent framework and to account for the interactions between these motivations in other than an additive or ad hoc fashion. The article builds on Siegwart Lindenbergs Goal Framing Theory, which provides consistent accounts of the cumulated and interactive influence of heterogeneous motivations on decisions. The goal framing approach is illustrated with an extensive range of examples borrowed from the empirical literature on regulatory compliance. It thus provides a synthetic framework to account for different types of responses to regulation.

Thoughts on How to Regulate Behaviours: An Overview of the Current Debate

ABSTRACT The article intends to present the debate on behaviour modification in the regulation studies literature, at a time of renewed interest among regulators for new ideas and strategies. As the financial crisis has led to the most public critique yet of the rational choice view of individuals that has informed regulation in the last few decades, other ideas that value realism more than simplicity and parsimony deserve some attention. Some of these – proposed by behavioural economics – have already raised considerable interest from regulators, especially in the UK and the USA, and have begun to impact various types of regulation. This article puts these various elements in perspective and as such provides tools to appraise and engage with past and future attempts to regulate social groups in health care and elsewhere.

Improving the Micro-Foundations of Actor-Centered Institutionalism

Institutionalist scholarship in political science has increasingly underscored the importance of agency in processes of institutional reproduction and change. This increasing “actor-centeredness” has so far not led to the development of a coherent theory of individual action that enables us to explain processes whereby shifts in logics of action occur and contribute to broader institutional processes. In this paper we present Goal Framing Theory (GFT) as a powerful theoretical tool in order to cover this gap. GFT provides a theory of goal-oriented action that explains not only how various logics of action coexist at the individual level, but also how they interact to influence actors’ behavior. Based on two empirical examples – patient capital in France and Germany, and foreign ownership of corporate stocks in Switzerland –, we show that GFT has the potential to provide a behavioral foundation for processes of institutional reproduction and change that are the result of shifts of logics of action.