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1 Building a Framework for Contextualizing Compliance
Saba Siddiki, Tanya Heikkila, and Salvador Espinosa
The Importance of Compliance
It is difficult to imagine a situation not governed by norms, rules, or laws. As children, authority figures teach us what we are forbidden, required, and allowed to do at certain times, situations, and places. As we grow older and expand the scope of our activities, we are subject to various cultural norms and rules of the groups and organizations where we are members (e.g., school, workplaces, clubs), and to the laws of the jurisdictions where we live or travel. On one level, learning rules of behavior at a young age can ensure that we can effectively socialize with those in our surrounding contexts. At another level, learning rules and norms from a particular culture or subculture can bring us into conflict with those of another culture or subculture.
These various types of cultural, subcultural, organizational, and governmental norms and rules are referred to broadly here as behavioral directives. People design these directives to shape the behavior of individuals and groups toward some desired outcome or set of outcomes. Behavioral directives serve many broad functions. From a functionalist perspective, behavioral directives are mechanisms that identify the behaviors that promote stable societies or social control (Parsons, 1951, 1962; Treviño, 2008). They can establish rights, help distribute income and wealth, and encourage consistency and predictability of social behavior. Behavioral directives perform an educational function and socialization role by reinforcing what is desirable and acceptable (Podgórecki, 1974). By reflecting what their designers perceive to be acceptable, even ideal behavior for realizing desired social outcomes, behavioral directives also play a normative role. Because behavioral directives represent underlying norms and values, they can be ideological and require coercion, depending on who exercises the power and influence over their creation, application, and enforcement. As a result, they can also create conflict and promote resistance (Turk, 1969, 1982).
Ultimately, behavioral directives are only effective at achieving the intended results of their creators if those they govern follow them. A critical question in contexts governed by rules and norms, which this book addresses, is thus: What factors influence the decision of an individual or organization to comply (or not) with a rule or norm? Practically, compliance can be thought of as merely following directives. On a deeper level, compliance can suggest that those governed by directives acknowledge their legitimacy and accept that they are consistent with their values or beliefs, or that they are committed to the social goals that compliance can achieveâsuch as safety, equity, order, and social welfare. Alternatively, compliance may suggest that followers fear the consequences of noncompliance. Fearful compliance may indicate that followers oppose the directives and only follow them to the extent that they are enforced. In some cases, compliant individuals may only follow directives superficially as a cover to allow their informal practice of deviant noncompliance. Superficial compliance indicates that directives provide a protective framework within which individuals can exploit loopholes, gaps, fissures, and contradictions, and can replace those directives with alternative norms. Indeed, a host of factors can complicate and even compromise compliance, including competing norms and rules, differences in interpretation, changing environments, and resistance. Thus, studying compliance to uncover whether it is occurring, as well as what motivates it and neutralizes its authority, is central to the broader study of governance.
The following examples illustrate some of the situations where compliance is critical to successful governance:
- Safety and quality of food systems: On a daily basis, we expect that the food we consume will be safe and that food producers will follow rules and regulations. Aquacultureâor farmed seafoodâis an example of a growing food industry governed under a complex regulatory system, but we know little about how and under what conditions aquaculture producers are likely to comply. Farmersâ compliance may be motivated by their agreement with new regulations, social pressure from other farmers, as well as farmersâ own commitment to produce high quality products. Understanding compliance in relatively newly regulated industries, like aquaculture, is critical for developing successful regulatory programs.
- Drug policy: A growing number of countries and American states have chosen to legalize or decriminalize the use of marijuana. This, however, does not mean that their governments should not persuade users to limit their consumption patterns given the potential public health consequences of high levels of marijuana consumption. Think, for example, about a college student who smokes marijuana regularly as a way to cope with stress. The student is not aware of the potential long-term health effects, but might change his habit if presented with compelling evidence about the negative effects. What factors should government officials consider when designing programs to discourage this type of drug use?
- Motivating voluntary compliance: Not all activities or behaviors are driven by mandates. In fact, organizations and governments often create programs that require voluntary compliance to produce some intended social or group benefits. For example, getting people to voluntarily reduce their energy consumption in their homes or offices can save money and reduce pollution. How can we design such programs to foster voluntary compliance?
- Alternative methods of justice procurement: The approach to sentencing for many types of convicted offenders often fails to address underlying problems (e.g., drug use, mental health conditions, and access to resources). Alternative systems for processing such offenders are emerging across the United States to help deal with some of these underlying challenges and reduce criminal behaviors. How can we design these processes to ensure that they incentivize compliance with the law, while giving people opportunities to overcome the underlying challenges that often inhibit compliance?
- Sharing water resources across state lines: Most major river basins in the United States cross multiple state lines. River basins provide critical resources for agricultural production, urban water supplies, recreation, and industrial productivity. Because of the dependence that downstream states have on upstream states to ensure that sufficient water supplies are available to meet these needs, many states have entered into interstate agreements or compacts to allocate supplies. However, when new demands emerge or when the volume of stream flows diminish (i.e., due to droughts), what ensures that states will comply with the agreements they enter into?
- Police behavior: In the wake of Michael Brownâs death at the hands of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated an investigation of the Ferguson police department under the authority of Section 14141 of the 1994 Crime Act (see U.S. Department of Justice, 2015). In such cases, when the DOJ finds police have misused force or engaged in discriminatory policing, the DOJ has authority to sue to bring the department into compliance with federal law. Ferguson avoided litigation by agreeing to implement a series of reforms such as enhanced officer training and internal and external accountability systems. Understanding the factors that shape local police compliance with these agreements can shed light on the conditions that will support lawful police behavior.
These examples underscore not only the importance of compliance or noncompliance in society, but also the potential complex array of factors that can affect compliance and noncompliance and fundamental questions about what compliance even means. Learning about the factors animating compliance has been the focus of thought-provoking discussions in academia and the world of policymaking. Numerous empirical studies, theories, and analytical lenses have improved our knowledge of this topic. While this research spans multiple fields and contributes complementary insights, there has been surprisingly little cross-fertilization across these fields. This is where the contribution of this book resides.
Contextualizing Compliance in the Public Sector adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of compliance by bringing together the reflections and empirical analyses of a group of scholars interested in the connections among alternative governance settings; the potential behavioral responses of individuals, groups, and organizations; and the ways that such connections may inform policymaking. The exchange of ideas started with a two-day workshop at San Diego State University with colleagues from across the United States who are trained in social psychology, criminology, public policy, and public administration. Integrating the diverse perspectives of the participants led to a framework that put us closer to a more unified lens for studying compliance. The remainder of this introductory chapter focuses on describing this analytical framework.
The chapters that follow illustrate how the different factors identified in the framework play out in various compliance contexts at different levels of analysis (i.e., individual, or micro level; group, or meso level; systems, or macro level). They thus help identify better ways to measure and assess compliance. Additionally, this work can provide insights into the design of rules and directives that may foster compliance, or potentially minimize noncompliance, deviance, and resistance. Ultimately, through these analyses, the authors aim to stimulate a conversation among scholars, students, and future practitioners) in public administration and policy, criminal justice, sociology, political science, and other fields. This conversation is enabled by the unveiling of connections among governance directives, compliance behavior, and policy outcomes.
What Is Compliance?
We define compliance as a behavioral state in a specific time, situation, and place that conforms (completely or partially) to behavioral directives, such as those embodied in laws, social norms, and organizational policies. Logically, then, we define noncompliance as a behavioral state that does not conform to behavioral directives. In the following section, we elaborate on key components of these definitions.
The first part of this definition identifies compliance as manifested in individual or collective behavior, where individual behavior refers to the conduct of a person and collective behavior refers to the conduct of a group of people. We distinguish the act of compliance as being different from the ability to comply, attitudes about compliance, and intentions and motivations of compliance. Though we limit our definition of compliance behaviorally, it is still broad enough to account for relevant behavioral complexities. For example, behavior is not static. Sometimes individuals act in conformance with behavioral directives, while other times not, based on a variety of subjective factors (Tyler, 2006). Further, behavior can be partially in conformance with behavioral directives. Individuals may only conduct a portion of the full array of activities to be deemed compliant. In other words, we recognize the range of behavioral activity falling within the opposing conceptual poles of compliance and noncompliance.
The second part of our definition of compliance acknowledges that a pre-condition of compliance is the existence of explicit or understood directives. These directives usually convey expectations about specific behaviors under some mix of spatial and temporal conditions. Just as our definition of compliance accommodates some of the complexities associated with conformance to behavioral directives, it also accommodates complexities associated with the behavioral directives themselves. It acknowledges, for example, that different types of directives can complement or contradict each other in substance or interpretation.
We delineate behavioral directives in two ways. First, we categorize directives in terms of their coerciveness, or prescriptive force, and enforceability through sanctioning. This first categorization leads to a distinction of directives as being strategies, norms, and rules (Crawford & Ostrom, 1995). We borrow this distinction from Crawford and Ostrom (1995), who define behavioral directives as written, verbal, or understood expectations about the opportunities and constraints of action in a given situation. According to Crawford and Ostrom, rules are those directives that explicitly identify whether a specific behavior is allowed, required, or forbidden and identify sanctions for noncompliance. Norms are directives that identify what is allowed, required, or forbidden but do not explicitly identify sanctions for noncompliance. Finally, strategies specify activities for certain conditions but lack a mandate (e.g., may, must, must not) and clear sanctions.
The second way we delineate behavioral directives is in terms of âin-formâ directives and âin-useâ directives (Ostrom, 2005). This categorization is akin to the long-standing socio-legal concepts of formal law (i.e., written, or âlaw in the booksâ) and legal realism (i.e., law in practice âwhat the courts doâ) (Holmes, 1881; Llewellyn, 1962). In-form and in-use directives may be viewed as equally legitimate and salient to those governed by them, but differ in terms of their codification in written form by an authorized entity. Examples of in-form directives include government laws and regulations or organizational policies and bylaws. In-use directives are often unwritten and generally accepted and, like in-form directives, specify how individuals should behave. In-use directives are established once a relatively large group of individuals recognizes them over a significant period of time. Both in-form and in-use directives are enforceable, although the enforcing entity often differs. Governmental or organizational mechanisms often enforce in-form directives, while community-based social control mechanisms typically enforce in-use directives.
In-form and in-use directives relating to a specific behavior at a given time or place may or may not be consistent. For example, a formal regulation may require enforcement personnel to administer a financial penalty for every observed incidence of noncompliance with regulatory directives. In reality, the agency charged with administering the regulation may have informally adopted a culture of allowing noncompliers the opportunity to correct their behavior before administering a penalty. An analogous example is an understanding among police officers that drivers are allowed to drive five or more miles per hour over the official speed limit before a speeding ticket is issued. Over time, the in-use directives are perceived and accepted by those implementing them as well as by those governed by them. The speeding enforcement also points to a situational variant that affects compliance. Some drivers will conform to the normative practice of driving no more than five miles over the speed limit in situations where they perceive high risk of enforcement, as indicated by the visible signs of police or advanced notice from a radar detector. However, in situations of a lower perceived risk, they may be noncompliant with both in-form and in-use directives. This would be an illustration of selectively situational compliant behavior and the crucial importance of the context of compliance.
Our definition of compliance recognizes different combinations of compliance and noncompliance that may arise in situations where in-form and in-use directives are inconsistent. That is, our definition of compliance is not limited to a particular type of directive. One can be in compliance or partial compliance at any given time with in-form directives, in-use directives, both, or neither on a regular basis. Table 1.1 introduces some of the combinations of compliance that may result in a social setting governed by in-form directive...
