Regulation and the Role of Trust: Reflections from the Mining Industry

The role of prosecution in achieving compliance with social regulation is a highly contentious issue, nowhere more so than with regard to work-related injury and death in the New South Wales mining industry. Following a mining disaster, political pressure prompted the mines inspectorate to abandon its traditional 'advise and persuade' approach in favour of a much tougher, deterrence-oriented approach. Our field-work suggests that while the former approach can result in regulatory capture, the latter can be equally counterproductive. In the mining industry, interactions between inspectors and the regulated industry are frequent and ongoing and trust is central to constructive relations. When those relations break down (as under an inappropriate prosecution policy) then dialogue ceases, information is withheld rather than shared, in-firm accident investigation, prevention, and remedial action are inhibited and both sides retreat to a form of adversarialism that undermines regulatory effectiveness. Through a 20-year case study of the mines inspectorate, the article demonstrates the centrality of trust to regulatory effectiveness, how it can be lost, and how it can best be regained.     

Exploring black political intolerance

Forty years of research in political tolerance has produced only tangential evidence of blacks' commitment to the principles of democracy and their willingness to apply them to specific situations. Implicit in this literature is that blacks' socialization into a rigid culture stressing authoritarian values, low levels of education, and certain psychological deficiencies interfere with the acquisition of democratic values. As a result, black intolerance is accepted as uncontrollable and involuntary. In this paper, I challenge this view of black intolerance. In particular, I consider how black political intolerance is used as an emancipatory strategy to protect blacks from groups who directly threaten their physical and psychological security. The analysis reveals that blacks identify the historical and current attempt of the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize and demean them, and thus, attempt to restrain its behavior. Black intolerance is a conscious and focused decision that allows blacks to distinguish between everyday racists and bigots, and the anxiety and fear generated by the Klan.