Motivating Management: Corporate Compliance in Environmental Protection*

Based on interviews with facility managers in the electroplating and chemical industries, this study examines regulated firms’ perceptions of how various instrumental, normative, and social factors motivated their firms’ environmental actions. We found that “implicit general deterrence” (the overall effect of sustained inspection and enforcement activity) was far more important than either specific or general deterrence, and that deterrence in any form was of far greater concern to small and medium‐sized enterprises than it was to large ones. Most reputation‐sensitive firms in the environmentally sensitive chemical industry chose to go substantially beyond compliance for reasons that related to risk management and to the perceived need to protect their social license to operate. Almost half our respondents also provided normative explanations for why they complied. Overall, we conclude that there are various, often interwoven, strands that must be taken into account in understanding what motivates corporate environmental behavior, and how they play out depends very much on the size and sophistication of companies themselves and on the characteristics of the industry sector within which they are located.     

General Deterrence and Corporate Environmental Behavior*

This research addresses the assumption that “general deterrence” is an important key to enhanced compliance with regulatory laws. Through a survey of 233 firms in several industries in the United States, we sought to answer the following questions: (1) When severe legal penalties are imposed against a violator of environmental laws, do other companies in the same industry actually learn about such “signal cases”? (2) Does knowing about “signal cases” change firms’ compliance‐related behavior? It was found that only 42 percent of respondents could identify the “signal case,” but 89 percent could identify some enforcement actions against other firms, and 63 percent of firms reported having taken some compliance‐related actions in response to learning about such cases. Overall, it is concluded that because most firms are in compliance already (for a variety of other reasons), this form of “explicit general deterrence” knowledge usually serves not to enhance the perceived threat of legal punishment, but as reassurance that compliance is not foolish and as a reminder to check on the reliability of existing compliance routines.     

Politics and Markets in the Irish 'Celtic Tiger'

Ireland's rate of growth and employment creation during the 1990s far outstripped economic performance in the rest of the OECD. Competing explanations are available in accounting for these outcomes, one stressing the primacy of the market, the other focusing on political choice. A case is made for the importance of politics, particularly the successful strategic adaptation to the challenges and opportunities afforded by the completion of the Single European Market during the 1990s. Ireland, as a small open economy, needs to combine effective external adjustment with appropriate domestic adjustment policies. Two policy areas are chosen for particular attention: industrial development strategy, and social partnership arrangements. This experience has implications beyond the Irish case, as the new central European and Baltic EU member states face similar challenges of policy adaptation.     

GOVERNANCE AS POLITY: AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH TO THE EVOLUTION OF STATE FUNCTIONS IN IRELAND

State institutions mediate the challenges of globalization for the domestic political community: the concerns of specialists in comparative politics and in public administration are increasingly converging round an interest in the nature and functioning of state institutions. This paper draws on preliminary findings from a time-series database of national-level political institutions in Ireland to track continuity and change in state functions through analysis of state agencies. It also identifies four modes of state action: developmental, regulatory, adjudicatory, and moral advocacy, each of which has a traditional and a modern manifestation. While the first two modes are familiar in comparative context, the latter two are likely to merit further analysis cross-nationally.