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The concept of frontline safety encapsulates an approach to occupational health and safety that emphasizes the “other side of the regulatory relationship”—the ways in which safety culture, individual responsibility, organizational citizenship, trust, and compliance are interpreted and experienced at the local level. By exploring theoretical tensions concerning the most appropriate way of conceptualizing and framing frontline regulatory engagement, we can better identify the ways in which conceptions of individuals (as rational, responsible, economic actors) are constructed and maintained through workplace interactions and decision making as part of the fulfillment of the ideological and constitutive needs of neoliberal labor markets.

This article reviews the last five years of coalition government policy making in relation to occupational health and safety law. It shows that the most significant and influential element of this activity has been the reframing of the wider regulatory system according to a dominant ideological paradigm of ‘common‐sense’ regulation, to the detriment of other considerations and interests. A social constructionist framework assists in setting out the means through which this new ‘symbolic universe’ of regulatory possibility has been constructed and promulgated within the policymaking arena. In particular, it identifies the key role played by processes of deliberative regulatory engagement in the construction and development of this approach, and identifies the inherent vulnerability of ‘thin’ forms of deliberation to this sort of application.

The successful enforcement of health and safety regulation is reliant upon the ability of regulatory agencies to demonstrate the legitimacy of the system of regulatory controls. While ‘big cases’ are central to this process, there are also significant legitimatory implications associated with ‘minor’ cases, including media‐reported tales of pettiness and heavy‐handedness in the interpretation and enforcement of the law. The popular media regularly report stories of ‘regulatory unreasonableness’, and they can pass quickly into mainstream public knowledge. A story's appeal becomes more important than its factual veracity; they are a form of ‘regulatory myth’. This paper discusses the implications of regulatory myths for health and safety regulators, and analyses their challenges for regulators, paying particular attention to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which has made concerted efforts to address regulatory myths attaching to its activities. It will be shown that such stories constitute sustained normative challenges to the legitimacy of the regulator, and political challenges to the burgeoning regulatory state, because they reflect some of the key concerns of late‐modern society.

This paper seeks to bridge the disciplinary gap between regulation and governance studies, and criminology. Based on a review of theoretical and empirical work on corporate crime, this paper argues that divergent approaches to questions of individual agency, localized variety, and political context, have drawn these two disciplines in different directions. Regulatory governance scholarship has thrived as a discipline, but has also narrowed its focus around these issues. Corporate criminology offers a means of broadening this focus by drawing attention to the normative theorizing behind the regulatory project. At the same time, however, insights drawn from regulatory governance scholarship can prompt corporate criminology to innovate by broadening the scope of its engagement beyond the sphere of traditional criminal justice. The paper argues for the development of a research agenda to sit at their intersection, to engage with the challenges that exist at the interface between criminal and regulatory law.