Regulation: Standard Setting and Enforcement

Abstract

T he use of the law to regulate business and industrial activities has been a feature of 20th-century life in Western industrial societies. Yet it is only in recent years that this form of legal and social control has become the subject of academic attention. Much of the early work on regulation has followed in the tradition of sociological and criminological studies of the police, in particular ethnographic studies of the regulatory enforcement official at work. As a result we have an increasingly sophisticated knowledge and understanding of the enforcement of regulatory law. But other regulatory arenas are only just beginning to attract academic interest, notably the areas of regulatory policymaking and the impact of regulation upon business and industry. In many respects this is not surprising, for these are less visible and less accessible areas of regulation than the work of field-level bureaucrats, the study of whom has already laid the foundations for a deeper understanding of the