Variations in Regulatory Enforcement Styles

This paper examines intra- and inter-agency variations in the enforcement styles of three regulatory inspectorates in Great Britain. It is argued that the accommodative approach typically associated with regulatory enforcement is not a homogeneous and uniform concept, rather it embraces a range of strategies. These are described and a variety of organisational, social and political factors are considered as explanations of the variations which arise.     

Understanding the New Regulatory Governance: Business Perspectives

This article considers business understandings of two of the principal features of the new regulatory governance. First, it focus on attempts to place greater responsibility for risk regulation on business and asks how well equipped they are to manage this. Second, it examines the decentering of the state and considers how business organizations view the influence of nonstate actors on their business regulation. These issues are discussed with reference to data from two different research projects in the United Kingdom. The findings question the implicit assumptions the new regulatory governance makes about how well equipped businesses are to manage the risks they generate and how able nonstate influences are to influence the full range of businesses.     

Dynamics of protest and electoral politics in the Great Recession

This article links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large-scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short-run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the two arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic grievances. More specifically, it is argued that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilisation should, thus, amplify the impact of economic hardship on the electoral losses of incumbents and mainstream parties more generally. The empirical analysis to study this relationship relies on an original semi-automated protest event dataset combined with an updated dataset of electoral outcomes in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and point to a destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.     

The Response of Business to Social Regulation in England and Wales: An Enforcement Perspective*

This paper considers business adaptation to legal regulation from an enforcement perspective. It is argued that regulatory agencies and business have a reflexive relationship in which there is a continual process of adaptation and readaptation by one party and then the other. This reflexivity and its implications are discussed with reference to socio-legal research into the regulation of occupational health and safety and environmental pollution in England and Wales.     

Is Enforced Self-regulation a Form of Risk Taking?: The Case of Railway Health and Safety

Enforced self-regulation exemplifies a number of regulatory trends, in particular the co-existence of public and private forms of regulation, state moves to harness other sources of regulation and the growing attempt of the state to penetrate deep into corporate life. This paper explores the limits of enforced self-regulation through discussion of corporate responses to occupational health and safety regulation in Britain. It takes the example of the railway industry where a particularly extreme version of enforced-self regulation eventually led to tragic consequences.     

The Contexts of Regulation: The Impact Upon Health and Safety Inspectorates in Britain

It is argued that the systematic study of regulation should include an analysis of the structural contexts within which agencies with enforcement authority are embedded. At least four contexts affect indirectly and directly the process of regulation: the political, the economic, the scholarly and the media. The period of the mid- 'eighties in Britain is characterized and trends in that period are described. The decline in resources, a political and scholarly environment of "de-regulation" and increased media interests in aspects of regulation in general, it is argued, shape regulation in Great Britain. The authors use records, field and interview data from an on-going research program on health and safety regulation in England and the structure and operations of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) at the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, Oxford, to a) examine structural changes in the organization(s) of which the HSE is constituted b) identify stresses and conflicts within the HSE c) record resultant patterns of morale and performance and d) describe efforts at achieving rationalization and formalization. It is concluded that in the context of declining resources and pressures to appear efficient, potentially divisive stresses and conflicts in regulatory bodies, if the HSE is at all representative, will continue and will underlie changes and developments that can be expected to emerge.