Sharon Gilad

The Rise of the British Regulatory State: Transcending the Privatization Debate

This article reviews three recent books that explore the social and political foundations of the regulatory changes in the governance of British society and economy. Beyond privatization, there is increasing delegation to autonomous agencies, formalization of relationships, and proliferation of new technologies of regulation in both public and private spheres. Sociolegal, public administration, and political economic perspectives can help explore the forces that shape these new institutions. The notion of regulatory society accompanies the rise of the regulatory state.

Accountability or Expectations Management? The Role of the Ombudsman in Financial Regulation

Current research of third-party complaint handling institutions evaluates their success in providing redress and advancing service improvement. This focus is driven by a normative predisposition. In contrast, this study is based on an inductive, ethnographic research of the UK Financial Ombudsman Service. This inductive analysis is employed to develop hypotheses to guide future research on third-party complaint handling. It is suggested that current literature may have overlooked the role of third-party complaint handling schemes in managing what, from a professional point of view, are citizen-consumers excessive expectations for redress. The normative implications of this tentative empirical claim are further discussed.

Attention and Reputation: Linking Regulators’ Internal and External Worlds

The responsiveness of regulatory agencies and other bureaucracies to their political environment is a key concern of executive politics research.1 Given the salience of this issue it is surprising how little we know about the informal institutional structures and dynamics that mediate bureaucracies’ responsiveness to external signals and demands. The aim of this chapter is to theorize, and to empirically illustrate, this process of internal mediation. Its particular focus is on the shaping of regulators’ prioritization of tasks as one important indicator of their responsiveness. It asks: how do regulatory agencies prioritize their tasks in the light of external signals?

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.

Does exposure to other cultures affect the impact of economic globalization on gender equality

An extensive literature shows that economic globalization has a positive effect on gender equality. However, the effect varies greatly across countries and time. This article argues that social globalization – individuals’ exposure to external ideas, people, and information flows – and the changes in values associated with it – is a key boundary condition for the effect of economic globalization on women’s rights. While economic globalization opens up new opportunities for women, policy adaptation to these changes requires a social demand for efforts for change. Social globalization contributes to policy adaptation by exposing the public to alternative gender-role models, setting off a shift in values, which underlies support for gender equality. Results emerging from a time-series-cross-sectional analysis of 152 nations for the period 1990–2003 confirm that the positive effect of economic globalization on gender equality wanes at lower levels of social globalization. Further, multilevel-path-analyses models demonstrate how changes to individual-level values mediate the effect of globalization on individuals’ support for gender equality.