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The legal devices crafted within large organizations are a key component of legal endogeneity theory (LET). While symbolically complying with legislation, legal devices allow organizations to infuse managerial logics into the legal field, which eventually diverts law from its initial political goals. Although the LET has considered legal devices such as anti-discrimination guidelines and grievance procedures, this chapter argues that contracts also constitute a locus of symbolic compliance and contribute to the eventual endogenization of regulation. Supplementing LET with a focus on legal intermediation, this chapter explores how contracts are crafted and used by large organizations to respond to regulatory pressure. While other legal instruments are unambiguously managerialized from the outset, contracts are highly versatile legal objects that perform the seemingly opposite functions of symbolically complying with regulation and serving substantive commercial purposes. This discussion of the role of contracts as compliance mechanisms is based on an in-depth empirical study of the French retail industry and its response to a set of regulations that aimed at making their business practices fairer.

Regulators can adjust penalties to compensate for incomplete monitoring of regulated parties that are subject to legal rules, but compensating penalty adjustments often are unavailable when regulated parties are subject to legal standards. Incomplete monitoring consequently invites greater noncompliance under standards than under rules. This chapter develops a model that quantifies some of the specific tradeoffs that regulators face in designing standards regimes under incomplete monitoring. The model also considers the extent to which suboptimal compliance due to incomplete monitoring is likely to result in deadweight loss in different settings.

This paper proposes a holistic institutional approach to provide insight into the policy reforms necessary to progressively achieve compliance with internationally recognized labor-related human rights. Drawing on institutions theory from political economy, the paper reframes international legal norms as holistic institutions, comprised of rules, social norms, and actual behaviors, the so-called rules of the game. In this way, problems in implementing labor-related human rights that may result in violations of international law are also considered as employment practices and, like other employment practices, are embedded in a web of formal and informal rules – institutions that govern work and employment. Based on the understanding that institutions contribute to violations, this holistic institutional approach also includes a framework to improve regulation and compliance based on Harold Koh's compliance theory from international law. The approach is illustrated using the example of forced obligatory overtime in textile assembly (maquilas) in Honduras and Nicaragua.

This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

Most research ethic review procedures refer to the principles of safety and security only as sub-criteria of other ethical principles such as the protection of human subjects in research, thereby ignoring the public good aspect of safety and security. In addition, Research Ethics Review Committees (RECs) are usually dominated by philosophers, ethicists, medical doctors, and lawyers with limited practical backgrounds in safety and security risk management. This gap of knowledge restricts ethics reviews in carrying out project-specific safety and security risk management and defers this responsibility to lawmakers and national legal authorities. What might be sufficient in well-regulated and well-understood environments, such as the safety of individuals during clinical research, is insufficient in managing rapidly changing and emerging risks – such as with emerging biotechnologies – as well as addressing the public good dimension of safety and security.

This chapter considers governance approaches to safety and security in research. It concludes that legal mechanisms are insufficient to cope with the complexity of and the fast progress made in emerging technologies. The chapter also addresses the role and potential of research ethics as a safety and security governance approach. It concludes that research ethics can play an important role in the governance of such risks arising from emerging technologies, for example through fundamental rights and public good considerations. However, in reality the current capacity of ethics in the safety and security governance of emerging technologies is limited. It is argued that in newly emerging areas of research currently applied legal compliance–based approaches are insufficient. Instead, inclusion of fundamental risk management knowledge and closer interactions between scientists, safety, and security experts are needed for effective risk management. Safety and Security Culture provide frameworks for such interactions and would well complement the current legal compliance–based governance approaches in research ethics.

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze the legal issues of enforcement for corporate governance in Vietnam, focusing primarily on constraints that are faced by companies. And subsequent recommendations to Vietnam's policy makers are raised. In support of working out a legal framework on enforcement of corporate governance, the article has initially focused on assessment of the enforcement for corporate governance in Vietnam. The theoretical framework is that of OECD Principles of Corporate Governance (April 1999, Paris). Furthermore, this article briefly raises some relevant impacts by corporate governance enforcement on compliance with best standards of corporate governance. The article also addresses current impediments on enforcement of corporate governance. It is concluded that enforcement of corporate governance requires making the legal framework perfect to assist inspectors with enforcement of corporate governance; and improvements on the legal framework to enhance the capacity of implementing officials is a need.

This study investigates what causes businesses to increase their environmental stewardship beyond the governmental standards. This “beyond compliance behavior” is examined by analyzing the influence of organizational slack and institutional pressures in the European paper and paperboard industry. Beyond compliance behavior is measured as the adoption of a sustainable forestry certificate issued by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The longitudinal (10-year period) dataset consists of adoption events per company, their business characteristics and historic socio-economic data per region in the respective European countries. Examination was done by means of an event history analysis using the program “R.” The results show differences between antecedents of compliance and beyond compliance behavior. The authors discuss the results in the light of institutional and stakeholder theories. Due to institutional shifts in environmental demands, adoption of an FSC certificate has become an off-the-shelf compliance answer to legitimacy issues disguised as a progressive environmental stewardship program.

This chapter examines institutional investors’ considerations while investing or otherwise engaging in the cryptocurrency sector, whether exclusively in bitcoin or the broader universe of crypto or decentralized finance assets. Given the rapid change in legal and regulatory oversight and cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation, offering inviolable advice about due diligence and compliance during commercial engagement is exceedingly difficult. However, general guidelines and rules of thumb are available.

This chapter provides an overview of local government auditing in Brazil. The mandate of regional Courts of Accounts, which are public audit organisations, includes overseeing states and municipalities’ legal compliance and public policy performance, while the federal Supreme Audit Institution scrutinises fiscal transfers from the central to local governments. Each of the 32 regional Courts of Accounts is autonomous. However, all follow the Napoleonic audit model and are internally organised in three main functions: auditing (comprising investigation, fair hearing and adversarial phase, and accusation), prosecuting (comprising legal compliance analysis), and judgmental. Despite the comprehensive legal mandate and recent digitalisation efforts, Courts still focus on compliance audit. Due to their autonomy, the Courts lack central coordination, standardised audit techniques, and uniform procedural rules. Moreover, the Courts’ lack of independence and transparency may impair their capacity to promote democratic accountability.