SCIENCE@home

Governing the gap: Forging safe science through relational regulation

Ruthanne Huising,S. Silbey

Published 2011 in Regulation & Governance

ABSTRACT

Designed to close the ubiquitous gap between law on the books and law in action, management systems locate the standard setting and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself. Despite efforts to more closely couple aspirations and performance, the gap re-emerges because the exigencies of practical action exceed the capacity of system prescriptions to anticipate and contain them. Drawing on data from a six-year ethnographic study of the creation and implementation of an environment, health, and safety management system, this article iden- tifies relational regulation as the approach used by front-line managers to govern the gap: keeping organizational activities within an acceptable range of variation close to regulatory specifications. We identify four practices - narrating the gap, inquiring without constraint, integrating pluralistic accounts, and crafting pragmatic accommodations - and three conditions under which actors may develop a sociological orientation to enact relational regulation. Overall, the article concludes that themechanismforassuringcomplianceresidesintheapprehensionof relationalinterdependencies rather than the management system per se. rego_1100 14..42

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-98 of 98 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 165 citing papers · Page 1 of 2

12
Next