Beyond Management Compliance: Organizational Conformity For Business Legitimacy

This book argues that management compliance is not sufficient for business legitimacy. True legitimacy is a matter of a company’s stakeholders’ values and actions being aligned with those of broader society. Alignment with laws, rules, and regulations is only a matter of corporate compliance necessary to secure the legal licensing to operate, and is distinct from conformance with the norms, values, and ethics necessary to secure the social license to operate. Simply “not violating laws” is not enough to make people trust a company. The movement from simple “compliance” to “conformity” is crucial — compliance may secure the legal license, but conformity secures the social one. It is for this reason that Beyond Management Compliance takes a criminological rather than a legal view regarding criminal liability. It is very different and far more successful to respond to conformance pressures (such as norms, values, and ethical issues) by adaptation than by strategy. Through an in-depth and case-study oriented exploration of bottom-up control involving change champions taking on the role of in-organization entrepreneurs, readers will learn the ways in which different types of control mechanisms — such as whistleblowing, transparency, resource constraints, and organizational culture — can be used to monitor, measure, and evaluate executives’ avoidance of deviant behaviors, and influence them towards corporate conformance in efficient, effective, and socially acceptable ways.