Compliance and Contestation

doi:10.1017/9781108759458.008

8 - Compliance and Contestation

from Part I - Compliance Concepts and Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2021

Fiona Haines

Edited by

Benjamin van Rooij and

D. Daniel Sokol

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Benjamin van Rooij: Affiliation:
School of Law, University of Amsterdam
D. Daniel Sokol: Affiliation:
University of Florida

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Summary

Abstract: The study of compliance is enriched when it is analysed as part of a contested landscape over the rules governing business conduct. This analysis requires going beyond the assumed connection between compliance and specific regulatory obligations, authorised actors or legal rules to interrogate its entanglement with multiple economic, social and political goals. The contours of this entanglement are often shaped by the tension between and within economic and social goals, tension that can be resolved either by supporting or challenging the status quo. Governments, and state authorities more broadly, bear primary responsibility for the management of the tension between economic and social demands. By modulating compliance obligations, these authorities can achieve temporary resolution of this tension, modulation that often, but not always, retains existing power relations. The chapter then focuses on which actors can challenge the status quo governing business behaviour by authoritatively calling attention to that behaviour as either compliant or non-compliant with legal obligations. Finally, the chapter explores the phenomenon of compliance independent from any connection to hard law, state-based regulatory regimes or courts and instances where acceptable behaviour, or a state of compliance, is not determined by regulators, laws or courts. Being able to define compliance independently from governments or law provides an alternative means to challenge the status quo governing business obligations. Here the chapter looks to international efforts to hold multinational businesses accountable for the harm they cause across borders. Efforts by local communities to demand that business meet social and not just legal expectations, namely that they comply with a social licence, provide a second example of compliance expectations beyond the law. Ultimately compliance, unmoored from a specific regulatory regime, actor or type of rule, becomes part of a fluid contested political landscape aimed at determining the rules governing business and commerce rather than a technocratic and restricted policy dilemma.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Compliance , pp. 93 - 103

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108759458.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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