Accountability infrastructures: Pragmatic compliance inside organizations

Abstract

We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setting, program design, and enforcement to the regulated organization. This delegation of governance to the organization itself has catalyzed the creation of accountability infrastructures within organizations, a network of offices, roles, programs, and procedures dedicated to aligning the organization's operations with external standards, codes of conduct, ethical and normative expectations, and regulations. Second, the diverse regulatory models depend, often implicitly, on organizational accountability infrastructures that incorporate the tenets of pragmatist philosophy: inquiry through narration, adaptation to context, and problem‐solving through experimentation. Reviewing the empirical literature on organizational compliance, we find ample evidence of inquiry through narration at the organizational coalface. However, we find limited evidence of narrating plurality in the organization and narrating experimentation as problem‐solving, as these activities create tensions with internal and external parties who expect singular, stable representations of governance. These tensions reveal an important incongruity between pragmatic governance across organizations and pragmatic governance within organizations. We contribute to the regulatory governance literature by documenting this important shift in the locus of governance to the organizational coalface and by charting a new research agenda. We argue that examinations of regulatory governance should be retraced in three ways. First, attention should shift to the organizational coalface, recognizing and analyzing accountability infrastructures as the central contemporary mechanism of governance. Second, the long‐standing focus in regulatory studies on why parties comply should shift to understanding how regulated parties manage themselves to achieve compliance. Third, analyses of compliance should examine the tensions in narrating adaptation and experimentation, and the implications of such tensions for the achievement of prosocial outcomes.

Rank Has Its Privileges: Explaining Why Laboratory Safety Is a Persistent Challenge

“…Conceptualized in varied terms such as new managerialism (Teelken, 2012 ), academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004 ), audit culture (Strathern, 2000 ), or the entrepreneurial university (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997 ), this new regime introduced performance management measures, monitoring and auditing systems, as well as private industry and business norms (Hoffman, 2017 ; Lam, 2010 ). It constitutes an accountability infrastructure—roles, rules, resources—dedicated to the mutual coordination of external and internal expectations with distributed performances (Huising & Silbey, 2021a ).…”

“…Comparing industry to academic ethics compliance, Smith-Doerr and Vardi ( 2015 ) describe the tension these rules generated among academics and the ways in which academics used humor to distance themselves from compliance with ethics programs. The increasing regulation of ethical conduct, surveillance, and audit in these settings has been labeled as accountability infrastructure by Huising and Silbey ( 2021a , 2021b ) and ethics creep by Haggerty ( 2004 ).…”

“…Our analysis of interviews with EHS personnel helps us explain the counter-intuitive findings from the violations data with a taxonomy describing variations in PIs’ responses to inspections. The interviews also show that the status differences between faculty members and EHS inspectors add an additional barrier to the functioning of the management system, designed to provide organizational accountability (Huising & Silbey, 2021a ). A simple three-category taxonomy with three dimensions derived from our empirical case (Bailey, 1994 ; Rich, 1992 ) describes the reactions of high-status actors to regulatory feedback.…”

“…Third, our study contributes to the larger organizational literature. Although the variation in regulatory compliance across organizations has been investigated extensively, only a few qualitative studies looked closely inside the regulated organization (e.g., Gray & Silbey, 2014 ; Huising & Silbey, 2021a ; Pérezts & Picard, 2015 ). We build on those studies to examine the variation across organizational actors’ compliant behavior.…”

Co-Opting Regulation: Professional Control Through Discretionary Mobilization of Legal Prescriptions and Expert Knowledge

“…At the same time, legal mandates designed to make professional work more legible and responsive to public and organizational expectations have been proliferating (Edelman 1992, Heimer 1999, Power 2005, Kellogg 2009, Pernell et al 2017, Huising and Silbey 2018. At the organizational level, these mandates are administered through accountability infrastructures consisting of dedicated roles, rules, standard operating procedures, and incentives, as well as information, reporting, and audit systems (Huising and Silbey 2021). These regulations and associated governance mechanisms are put in place to mitigate the risks stemming from critical social goods such as, for example, healthcare (Heimer 1999, Kellogg 2009, science (Huising 2014), or finance (Pernell et al 2017) and as such intrude on terrain otherwise governed by professions.…”