Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance
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Silbey_Governing inside.pdf
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660.93 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4d8d4180b425129c300f2edb201cd65a
Author(s)
Gray, Garry C.
Silbey, Susan S
Date Issued
July 2014
Journal
American Journal of Sociology
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
Gray, Garry C., and Susan S. Silbey. “ Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance 1 .” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 1 (July 2014): 96–145. © 2014 The University of Chicago
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations’ behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1086/677187
