Explaining Corporate Environmental Performance: How Does Regulation Matter?

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards.     

Gating Alleys to Reduce Crime: A Meta-Analysis and Realist Synthesis

Alley gates are designed to limit access to alleys and the crime opportunities they afford. Informed by the acronym EMMIE we sought to: (1) systematically review the evidence on whether alley gates are Effective at reducing crime, (2) identify the causal Mechanisms through which alley gates are expected to work and the conditions that Moderate effectiveness, and (3) collate information on the Implementation and Economic costs of alley gating. The results of our meta-analysis suggest that alley gating is associated with modest but significant reductions in burglary, with little evidence of spatial displacement. We also identified six mechanisms through which alley gates might plausibly reduce crime, and the conditions in which such mechanisms are most likely to be activated.     

Pretreatment self-esteem and posttreatment sexual recidivism

The relationship between self-esteem assessed prior to treatment using the Self-Esteem Scale and sexual recidivism was explored in two samples of adult male sex offenders, 53 of whom were beginning treatment in the community and 172 of whom were beginning treatment in prison. Sexual reconviction rates were obtained for both samples using a 6-year followup for the community sample and an average follow-up of just less than 4 years for the prison sample. Lower levels of self-esteem were associated with higher sexual recidivism rates with similar trends being apparent in both samples. The linear main effect of self-esteem was significant at beyond the .01 level in a logistic regression analysis. Receiver operating characteristics analysis was used to assess the strength of this association and an area-under-the-curve coefficient of .69 was obtained. Results are discussed in terms of their meaning for the relevance of self-esteem as a predictor of recidivism and as a target for treatment.     

Experience of a financial reforms project in Bangladesh

This article reviews the efforts of the Government of Bangladesh aimed at reforming the public sector financial management system as part of overall public administration reforms through a technical assistance project jointly sponsored by the government and the Department for International Development, Government of the UK. It has evolved through initial setbacks into a highly successful project delivering tangible outputs over the last three years, with prospects for future extension until reforms are internalized and become self‐sustaining. Attempts have been made in this article to analyse and evaluate the underlying reasons for the problems in the first year of implementation as well as the factors that contributed to the recovery of the image of the project and its continuing successes in successive phases. The article highlights the lessons learned from the project in its bad as well as good times and suggests that this experience can be of great value to those undergoing the same type of reform experiment. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When Social Norms and Pressures Are Not Enough: Environmental Performance in the Trucking Industry

Why do some business firms and not others work hard to advance regulatory values such as environmental protection and comply with regulations? Previous research indicates that business firms are influenced in that regard by a number of variables—not merely the perceived likelihood of legal punishment but also the risk of negative reactions by societal actors (which we call “social license pressures”) and the intensity of managers' commitment to norms of law‐abidingness and environmentalism. This article reports on a study of control of diesel emissions in the trucking industry, a highly competitive market with many small firms, mobile pollution sources, expensive “best control technologies,” and weak regulatory demands. In contrast to findings in studies of large firms, we found that social license pressures on small trucking firms are minimal. Trucking companies' environmental performance—good and bad—flows from managers' economic choices, which are influenced by their particular market niche. In such highly competitive, small‐firm market contexts, these findings imply, significant improvement in environmental performance is not likely without strong direct regulatory pressures.     

Compliance costs,regulation, and environmental performance: Controlling truck emissions in the US

When explaining regulatory policymaking and the behavior of regulated business firms, scholars have supplemented economic models by emphasizing the role of public‐regarding entrepreneurial politics and of normative pressures on firms. This article explores the limits of such entrepreneurial politics and “social license” pressures by examining regulation of emissions from diesel powered trucks in the US. We find that the economic cost of obtaining the best available control technology – new model lower emissions engines – has: (i) limited the stringency and coerciveness of direct regulation of vehicle owners and operators; (ii) dwarfed the reach and effectiveness of the governmental programs that subsidize the purchase of new less polluting vehicles; and (iii) elevated the importance of each company’s “economic license”– as opposed to its “social license”– in shaping its environmental performance. The prominence of this “regulatory compliance cost” variable in shaping both regulation and firm behavior, we conclude, is likely to recur in highly competitive markets, like trucking, that include many small firms that cannot readily either afford or pass on the cost of best available compliance technologies.     

Fault,Gender Politics and Family Law Reform

Recent public debates about family law reform have revealed both support for and criticism of legislative policies that seek to shape social norms. Amidst this debate was a suggestion from some quarters that the Whitlam Government's removal of fault‐based divorce is responsible for the gendered tensions that characterise modern reform debates. This article draws on archival records and interviews conducted with family law professionals who worked in the system in the 1970s and experienced the transition to the no‐fault system, to explore the principles underlying the introduction of the Family Law Act of 1975 and to identify the sources of continuing dissension about its impact.