Addressing the risk, reading the landscape: The role of agency in regulation

Abstract

The literature pertinent to regulation presents disparate views of the role of human agency in regulatory compliance. Some authors assume regulators' and regulatees' capacity for agency to be self-evident; others show that human agency may be constrained and as a consequence tends toward sustaining the legitimacy of their respective organizations rather than achieving the risk reduction goals prescribed by the regulatory regime. Drawing on Margaret Archer's work (among others'), this article explores how the agency of regulatory actors is critical to the regulatory project yet contingent. This contingency is explored through a comparative analysis of the regulatory responses to an industrial..