Suchergebnisse

In the last two decades, China organized political campaigns to fight corruption. Such campaigns led to an increased prosecution of high-profile cases involving high-level officials. Perceived corruption in China, however, has not decreased as a result, because the campaigns failed to address widespread lower-level incidents. China's political campaigns against corruption—the politico-legal campaigns—are an example of the use of political methods to enhance the legal system. China has organized several politico-legal campaigns to promote public awareness of legal issues and combat crimes, including illegal drug trade, copyright infringements, and environmental violations. The Chinese politico-legal campaigns show that China needs its effective laws to support government policies. A comparative analysis shows that there is a similar need for effective laws in the United States, especially in times of crises. Such effective laws usually come at the cost of sacrificing the formal-rational legal limits on governmental actions. Now that China is trying to establish the rule of law and the U.S. still faces crises related to drugs, crime, and terrorism, both countries face similar challenges in balancing their effective laws with the rule of law principle, and may learn from each other's experience.

AbstractThis paper seeks to understand the transmission and reception of legal rules as a component of the regulatory compliance process. It adopts a frontline approach (Almond and Gray 2017) to regulatory compliance that traces the grassroot functioning of compliance processes from regulator, to compliance managers to individual employees. Through a multilevel and multi-sited ethnography of worker safety protection in Chinese construction industry, this paper shows that in the cases studied there is a fundamental disconnect in the transmission and reception of law from regulator to organization and within the regulated organization. Yet at the same time, the paper finds that employees did comply with the law, and that thus compliance can exist without a full transmission and reception of legal rules into and within the regulated organization. By expanding the frontline approach to study regulation and compliance to look at the grassroots operation across three different frontlines, this study has been able to assess the legal assumptions inherent in existing regulatory compliance research. Not only does it find that compliance in these cases was not a top-down process and that we need to look at the grassroots operation inside organizations, it also shows that law does not always play a central role in regulatory compliance and that we need to reassess the implicit focus on law in regulatory compliance scholarship.