Compliance as a Vocation: Transforming Regulatory Policy into Organizational Policy through Moral Autonomy

Although organizations and the law are deeply intertwined, accounts of this relationship share the assumption that there is no or little important difference between regulatory policy and organizational policy. Yet, anyone who has read regulations alongside their sibling organizational policies can attest that someone has expended significant effort to transform regulatory frameworks into the policy binders, procedures, and guidance documents that circulate in regulated organizations. Beyond the dominant, yet circumscribed legal endogeneity account, we have limited knowledge of this process: what makes it necessary, who does this work, in whose interests, and to what ends? Drawing on a longitudinal field study of a national community of compliance officers, this paper provides an additional account of the relationship between organizations and the law. I show how regulations cross the threshold of the organization through the work of compliance officers who collectively respect the ends of the law but draw on a shared commitment to protecting society to fulfil these ends. They work autonomously from the interests of regulators and managers to reorganize, represent, and reformulate the law, making it understandable, credible, and useable. They demonstrate a foundational quality of Weber’s concept of vocation: the ability to reconcile an ethics of consequences with an ethics of conviction. Overall, this study offers a new account – one that emerges from the moral autonomy of the compliance community – of how organizations respond to the law, revealing an unobserved location of regulatory change and adaptation in service of societal interests.

This seminar will take place in person in room T8-67, Mandeville building. Alternatively, click here to join the seminar online.

Meeting ID: 973 5549 1316 
Passcode: 791805