Frontline Safety: Understanding the Workplace as a Site of Regulatory Engagement

Abstract

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.

The compliance model of employment standards enforcement: an evidence‐based assessment of its efficacy in instances of wage theft

“…earning less than two‐thirds the median hourly wage for full‐time employees), a group more likely to be reliant on minimum ES, rose from 26 per cent in 1997 to 31 per cent in 2016 (fully 38 per cent of employees in the private sector) (Statistics Canada, ). Such asymmetries have substantial implications for employees' willingness/ability to act as their own advocates, let alone on behalf of the interests of their co‐workers (Gray, ; Almond and Gray, ). Particularly in the context of non‐unionised workplaces, employees' exercise of voice is constrained (Vosko, ; Vosko and Thomas, ).…”

Performance regulation in a networked healthcare system: From cosmetic to institutionalized compliance

“…Since Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) introduced responsive regulation theory, scholars in this field have often analysed bilateral regulator-regulatee interactions (Mascini and Van Wijk 2009;Nielsen and Parker 2009) in a relatively tightly defined interactive space, ignoring the wider 'political surround' (Baldwin and Black 2008;Heimer 2011;Mascini 2013;Almond and Gray 2017). The focus on the problematic nature of hybrid interventions and escalation of sanctions narrowed 'responsiveness' to the pyramid of interventions (Braithwaite 2013;Mascini 2013).…”

Regulation and governance versus criminology: Disciplinary divides, intersections, and opportunities

“…While there is great variety in the way that “regulators” are conceived of in this literature (public, private, voluntary, market‐based, networked, and so on), this top‐down view tends to view the organizational entities that engage with it as uniform actors with easily‐identifiable motives and interests (Gray & Silbey ). Regulation is often presented as strategic, instrumental, and focused, rather than organic, messy, or contingent (Almond & Gray , p. 7; although see regulatory “experimentalism” in Overdevest & Zeitlin ). Following a general tendency within the regulatory state to prefer formal regulation over informal relations (Levi‐Faur ), regulatory research also downplays issues of individual agency and variation.…”

“…; Levi‐Faur ). The central dynamic of regulation is often viewed as a dyad between large‐scale, monolithic (public) regulators and (private) regulatees (Ford ; Koop & Lodge ), overlooking other actors (such as employees) who are, in practice, not empowered network members in their own rights (Almond & Gray , pp. 13–15).…”