Self-regulation Efforts Research Articles

Industrial responses to constrained OSHA regulation. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

As part of the effort to reduce the size and economic impact of the federal establishment, congressional conservatives are proposing legislation to restrict the regulatory activity of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). These proposals push OSHA toward a purely consultative role, at a corresponding cost in direct regulatory capability. The Clinton administration's reinvention of government initiative is also moving OSHA toward a consultative role based on a strategy of cooperative compliance or industry self-regulation with a strong coercive foundation. Since both camps appear to agree that self-regulation can assure a safe and healthy workplace, the remaining debate concerns the extent to which coercive regulation is still needed. National survey data on the industrial provision of occupational safety and health services in the manufacturing sector were used to measure changes in industrial safety and health activity between 1972-74 and 1981-83. In conjunction with data on OSHA command-and-control regulatory activity from 1972 to 1979, these data permitted an examination of the relationship between command-and-control regulatory activities and changes in industrial behavior that could be regarded as a form of self-regulation. This analysis showed that coercive regulation by OSHA in the 1970s was significantly related to industry self-regulation efforts, although the relationship varied by industrial facility employment size and type of regulatory coercion. These results indicate that coercive regulation should be retained as an industrial incentive in any self-regulation policy paradigm. The results also provide evidence that OSHA regulatory policy should be based on anticipated differences in industrial response to various coercive measures.

Privacy and Ethical Issues in Database/Interactive Marketing and Public Policy: A Research Framework and Overview of the Special Issue

Privacy is a high-profile public policy issue that affects consumers and marketers. The emergence of online marketing brings new privacy concerns that have resulted in Federal Trade Commission scrutiny and review. At the same time, industry groups and associations have been active in self-regulation efforts. To highlight areas in which marketing researchers can add value to the public policy discussion on privacy, the author provides a research framework that highlights four aspects of information exchange between marketers and consumers. The author argues that improving exchange mechanisms will provide consumers with more control and the ability to make more informed trade-offs of personal information for benefits. Within this framework, the author provides an overview of the articles in this special issue and suggests avenues for further research.

Trust and concern in consumers’ perceptions of marketing information management practices

This research examines two constructs, consumers’ trust and concern, in information management practices. The authors present empirical evidence from a national consumer survey that suggests improving trust and reducing concerns are two distinct approaches to managing consumer information. Contrary to existing self-regulation efforts, the authors argue that when managing consumer information, the improvement of trust is more effective than efforts to reduce concern.

Consumer Participation in Mailing Lists: A Field Experiment

Increasingly, companies are acquiring customer names and personal information for database marketing purposes. Because lists of customer names often are sold and rented without customer knowledge, legislation has been proposed to curtail the ability of marketers to sell personal information without customer consent. In reaction, the direct marketing community has responded with aggressive self-regulation, strongly recommending negative option permission formats and carefully worded disclosure statements. The author examines the assumptions underlying the direct marketing community's self-regulation efforts. Using afield experiment, the author measures consumers’ willingness to provide marketers with personal information and permission to rent this information based on varying permission formats, type of information requested, and level of disclosure. The results of the field experiment support the direct marketing community's assumptions about how question format affects consumers’ willingness to allow their personal information to be transferred to a third party. However, the results do not support the common assumptions that using negative option formats and not asking consumers for sensitive information improves consumers’ willingness to join mailing lists.

Adaptive Self-regulation: A Process View of Managerial Effectiveness

This article describes a set of processes involved in attaining managerial effectiveness. These processes are components of an adaptive self-regulation framework. They involve the active management of constituencies' role expectations and performance opinions through standard-setting, discrepancy-detection, and discrepancy-reduction. These processes serve to enhance constituents' opinions of the manager's effectiveness. Several social and contextual factors that either facilitate or inhibit managers' self-regulation efforts are identified and hypotheses to guide future empirical research are offered.

Assessments of Anticriminal Plans and the Prediction of Criminal Futures

These notes place an important limitation on the conclusions drawn by Friesen and Andrews (1982) regarding the predictive validity of a measure of the inprogram self-regulation efforts of 42 young-adult probationers. In the earlier report, assessments of self-regulation were found to be reliable (interrater r(20) = .96) and they correlated with intake socialization scores ( r(42) = .38), and with reconvictions monitored from the start of probation to the end of three postprobation years ( r(42) = -.38). The present note shows that the predictive validity of the self-regulation scores was only evident among high-risk cases: The correlation was -.70 with the recidivism of 19 low-socialization cases compared with -.02 among 23 high-socialization probationers. The results are discussed in relation to the risk principle of case classification.