Co-Opting Regulation: Professional Control Through Discretionary Mobilization of Legal Prescriptions and Expert Knowledge
Name
orsc.2021.1525.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
863.08 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ce6079e19d2076094b4db5f09f282823
Author(s)
Evans, Joelle
Silbey, Susan S
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Organization Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Evans, Joelle and Silbey, Susan S. 2021. "Co-Opting Regulation: Professional Control Through Discretionary Mobilization of Legal Prescriptions and Expert Knowledge." Organization Science.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The governance of front-line professionals is a persistent organizational problem. Regulations designed to make professional work more legible and responsive to both organizational and public expectations depend on these professionals’ willing implementation. This paper examines the important question of how professional control shapes regulatory compliance. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic study of a bioscience laboratory, we show how professionals deploy their discretionary judgment to assemble environmental, health, and safety regulations with their own expert practices, explaining frequently observed differential rates of regulatory compliance. We find that professional scientists selectively implement and blend formal regulations with expert practice to respond to risks the law acknowledges (to workers’ bodies and the environment) and to risks the law does not acknowledge but professionals recognize as critical (to work tasks and collegiality). Some regulations are followed absolutely, others are adapted on a case-by-case basis; in other instances, new practices are produced to control threats not addressed by regulations. Such selective compliance, adaptation and invention enact professional expertise: interpretations of hazard and risk. The discretionary enactment of regulations, at a distance from formal agents, becomes part of the technical, practical, and tacit assemblage of situated practices. Thus, paradoxically, professional expert control is maintained and sometimes enhanced as professionals blend externally imposed regulations with expert practices. In essence, regulation is co-opted in the service of professional control. This research contributes to studies of professional expertise, the legal governance of professionals in organizations, regulatory compliance, and safety cultures.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/ORSC.2021.1525
