What Drives Inspectors to Counteract Harmful but Legal Business Conduct? A Predictive Model Based on Quantitative Data from a Broad Range of Dutch Inspectorates

Ambiguous Signaling in Regulatory Conversations How Miscommunication and Hierarchy Hamper Voluntary Regulatee Cooperation

“…Whether a regulator primarily aims to elicit voluntary regulatee cooperation or to establish deterrence is a matter of supervisory strategy, or more particularly agency enforcement philosophy (May & Burby, 1998). To what extent this voluntary cooperation is sought also where there is no readily enforceable norm underlying such attempts, as in our case studies, may depend not only on the regulator’s discretionary attitude toward its supervisory mandate (Kasdorp, 2016) but also on individual inspectors’ preferences and enforcement style (Kasdorp & Zijlstra 2020). Our case studies focus on the ensuing interaction via face-to-face regulatory conversations (Black, 2002) between inspectors and regulatee representatives and the individual cognition and decision-making in the context of those conversations.…”