Self-regulatory Regime Research Articles

Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location

At the phenomenal level, consciousness arises in a consistently coherent fashion as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness (subjectivity) with explicitly orientational characteristics--that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain. Understanding these twin elements of consciousness begins with the recognition that ultimately (and most primitively), cognitive systems serve the biological self-regulatory regime in which they subsist. The psychological structures supporting self-located subjectivity involve an evolutionary elaboration of the two basic elements necessary for extending self-regulation into behavioral interaction with the environment: an orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing interaction in terms of controllable spatiotemporal parameters, and processing architecture that relates behavior to homeostatic needs via feedback. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged the emergence of anticipative feedforward processing mechanisms, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive self-locational schema processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness-as-subjectivity.

Heading into uncharted territory? Exploring the institutional robustness of self-regulation in the Antarctic tourism sector

This paper analyses the main strengths and weaknesses of self-regulation in the Antarctic tourism sector. Ostrom's theory of collective action and especially the design principles for robust management of common pool resources provide the framework for this analysis. The paper notes the rapid growth and diversification of tourism in Antarctica over the past two decades. It examines why formal tourism legislation has been limited because of the complex governance structure in Antarctica. It describes the self-regulation of tourism management that occurs through the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO). The success of IAATO is attributed to the high degree of organisation in the sector, largely because of the perceived benefits of membership. Continued incentives for self-organisation are needed but changing circumstances may lead tour operators to believe that IAATO membership is no longer advantageous. The paper shows that, under current conditions, the Antarctic tourism self-regulatory regime is a robust institution. However, with increasing numbers of tourists and operators the institutional structure may be weakened in the future.

Takeover Regulation: Through the Regulatory Looking Glass

It is too early to make a complete judgment on the effectiveness of Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids as a regulatory mechanism. Such a decision would involve determining whether the Directive: achieves its goals, secures high levels of compliance from Member States and market participants and is democratically accountable. However, this paper places the Directive under a regulatory microscope in order to reflect upon some of its potential strengths and failings in respect of these criteria. A central regulatory problem for European legislators involved determining the optimal balance between harmonization and diversity. In an attempt to reach agreement between Member States, a framework Directive was agreed laying down minimum standards for takeover regulation and a number of key provisions were made optional. On the one hand, it is argued that even this light regulatory touch may have jeopardised the existing efficient self-regulatory regime which operates in the UK, the largest European takeover market. On the other hand, by allowing Member States a significant degree of discretion in implementing the Directive, problems of interpretation and classification arise (is the Directive a company law directive or a capital markets directive?), regulatory gaps may be identified, national differences emerge and the achievement of the Directive's goal of facilitating takeovers and yielding a level playing field may be thwarted. In respect of the latter, the paper focuses on the restrictions on frustrating action and the breakthrough rule. Finally, the paper seeks to determine whether, in this context, competition is preferable to harmonisation. It was hoped that by setting down benchmarks the Directive might put a floor to the race to the bottom. Unfortunately, it is argued that the picture post-implementation does not support this contention.

Is Self-Regulated Peer Review Effective at Signaling Audit Quality?

This paper examines whether peer review conducted under the AICPA's self-regulatory regime has been effective at signaling audit quality. In spite of the long-standing debate about self-regulated peer review in the auditing profession, there is a surprising lack of research evidence as to whether such reviews are effective at signaling or improving audit quality. Prior research has examined whether the information contained in peer-review reports is associated with perceived audit quality (Hilary and Lennox 2005). We examine whether the information contained in peer-review reports is associated with actual audit quality. Our results suggest that self-regulated peer review does appear to provide effective signals regarding audit-firm quality. Specifically, we find that the number of weaknesses identified in peer-review reports is associated with other potential indicators of weak quality control or risky practices within accounting firms such as selling tax shelters, overworking staff, and taking on risky clients—even after controlling for changes in the peer-review environment over time. We also find that the number of weaknesses identified in peer-review reports is useful in predicting audit failure (i.e., malpractice claims alleging auditor negligence), and that certain types of peer-review findings (engagement-performance weaknesses, personnel-management weaknesses) are particularly useful in this regard.

Allocating Law-Making Powers: Self-Regulation vs. Government Regulation

Although a common institutional arrangement, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has received relatively little attention from economists. This paper uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to analyze the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of a regulatory process with bargaining, the authority to amend enabling legislation can be either consolidated within the government or extended to producers in a self-regulatory regime. The paper delineates the welfare implications of regulatory regime choice, identifies the conditions that lead a government to delegate or to centralize regulatory authority, and examines whether the government's institutional choice is efficient. Self-regulation is efficient when there is much uncertainty about the results of institutional implementation, when the government is populist, or when society is not polarized. Inefficient use of central regulation is more likely than inefficient use of self-regulation. A range of examples illustrates the model, identifying those features of legal traditions that explain cross-country variation in regulatory regime choice, illuminating the contrast in regulatory practice between the progressive era and the New Deal, and characterizing the mechanisms of intervention used under fascism.

Localism and Networking: A Radio News Case Study

The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 ushered in a new hands-off approach by government which, in the case of radio, permitted commercial broadcasters to double their investments in individual markets through the two-station policy while removing any onerous commitments to local content. Since then, there has been concern about the flow-on effect this may have had, with Peter Collingwood's 1997 study of commercial radio confirming that levels of local content were reducing as levels of networked content were increasing. He bemoaned the fact that a by-product of the self-regulatory regime was a reduction in the amount of publicly available information against which performance could be gauged. Since 1992, only one detailed study of local radio news has been done, Graeme Turner's 1996 examination of radio and television news in the Brisbane market. Now a parallel study has been conducted in Perth, giving an insight into localism and networking six years later.

Corporate Voluntarism and Human Rights

In response to increasing public concern over the accountability of transnational corporations (TNCs) for violations of human rights in the states in which they operate, governments, corporations and NGOs have promoted the development and implementation of voluntary self-regulatory regimes. However, TNC practices under these regimes call into question their adequacy and effectiveness in preventing complicity in egregious violations of human rights by corporations operating in conflict zones and repressive regimes. This article reviews and assesses the language, human rights content and compliance mechanisms of the voluntary policies and/or codes developed by a number of corporations, industry groups, intergovernmental organizations and multistakeholder initiatives, as well as associated corporate practices. The analysis shows that these voluntary regimes are flawed and inadequate, and therefore unable to ensure that TNCs are not complicit in human rights violations in their extra-territorial activities.

Risk management under wraps: self-regulation and the case of food contact plastics

This paper examines the reasons for the development and survival of self-regulatory regimes that manage risks to human health, using the self-regulation of food contact plastics in the UK from the 1950s to 1980s as a case-study. The self-regulatory arrangements are analysed from a control systems perspective and compared with the minimum arrangements that would be expected to correct for the market-failure characteristics of the risk. The paper finds that the self-regulatory regime failed to provide an adequate public interest response to potential market-failure. The regime, nevertheless, was sustained by three main factors: the political and interest group environment; transparency and accountability deficits; and, blame-avoidance behaviour on the part of central government. The paper concludes by considering the wider implications of this study for the self-regulation of health risks.

The Role of Self-Regulation of Privacy and the Internet

For several years now, Internet users have ranked privacy as the issue that concerns them the most. This paper traces the development of privacy rights on the web with emphasis on the USA and EU. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches to regulation, especially industry self-regulation. Both conceptually and in practice, there are problems with all the modes of regulation. In the U.S.A. there is pressure towards government regulation away from self-regulation. This is due in part to the high-profile breaches of privacy that went unpunished in the self-regulatory regime. It concludes with a basic set of guidelines on privacy for websites.

Protecting Privacy Online: Is Self-Regulation Working?

The author assesses the extent to which 361 consumer-oriented commercial Web sites post disclosures that describe their information practices and whether these disclosures reflect fair information practices. Although approximately 67% of the sites sampled post a privacy disclosure, only 14% of these disclosures constitute a comprehensive privacy policy. The study was initiated by the private sector as a progress report to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and is one in a series of efforts designed to assess whether consumer privacy can be protected through industry self-regulation or whether legislation is required. Although the FTC does not recommend legislation at this time, the study suggests that an effective self-regulatory regime for consumer privacy online has yet to emerge.

Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (review)

Reviewed by: Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science Alan Derickson Christopher C. Sellers. Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xv + 331 pp. Ill. $45.00. In Hazards of the Job, Christopher Sellers traces the rise and transformation of industrial hygiene—the paradigm within which biomedical investigators in the United States explored the impact of working conditions on the health of workers from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. As if it were not a formidable enough task to elucidate the changing context, aims, problems, methods, allies, and opponents of occupational medicine, Sellers also sets out to illuminate the emergence of environmental health science. His argument is that “it was within and through industrial hygiene that the study of environmental health acquired its modern cast” (p. 2). Sellers succeeds admirably in analyzing the accomplishments and contradictions of the first two generations of North American experts in occupational medicine. The hygienists’ search for disciplinary power perennially encountered the blunt obstructions and suffocating constraints of corporate capital. Moreover, investigators fortunate enough to gain access to the hidden environment of production often found themselves dealing with fearful and denying workers. In these forbidding circumstances, industrial hygienists ingeniously maneuvered to craft an approach both sufficiently rigorous to win scientific authority and sufficiently flexible in its ameliorative suggestions to accommodate business interests. The resulting strategies, as Sellers makes abundantly clear, brought some major advances in hazard recognition and control, but left most U.S. workers unprotected against the lethal risks of a proliferation of toxic chemicals, as well as physical and biological agents. The author vividly and penetratingly captures the predicament of the leaders of this fledging subspecialty, who were struggling to stake out a domain without much backing from either labor or the state and with too much guidance from capital. In this effort, he manages both to [End Page 364] elevate previously underappreciated figures like David Edsall and Joseph Schereschewsky and to reveal new facets of well-known characters like Alice Hamilton and Wilhelm Hueper. The emphasis on key individuals comes at a price, however. Except for the role of national meetings and some aspects of the expansion of state administrative capacity, institutional developments receive short shrift in this account. Although, to be sure, Sellers does take up the involvement of the American Association for Labor Legislation with phosphorus poisoning, the activities of a number of other important advocacy groups—the National Consumers League and the National Child Labor Committee, among others—receive scant attention. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (curiously, a private, not public, body) appears only in a footnote. Especially in order to understand fully the handling of occupational disease by the associative state and other largely self-regulatory regimes of the period, we need to know more about civil institutions in this field. Notwithstanding these limitations, Hazards of the Job is a welcome addition to the historical literature of occupational and environmental health. It is an imaginatively conceived and subtly argued study of an important facet of twentieth-century public health. Alan Derickson Pennsylvania State University, University Park Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Professional Ethics and The Culture of Trust

The cause of ethical failure in organisations often can be traced to their organisational culture and the failure on the part of the leadership to actively promote ethical ideals and practices. This is true of all types of organisations, including the professions, which in recent years have experienced ongoing ethical problems. The questions naturally arise: what sort of professional culture promotes ethical behaviour? How can it be implemented by a profession and engendered in the individual professional? The answers to these questions are of interest to business ethicists since the causes of ethical problems in business are often the same and the professions, as ethically challenged organisations, make useful and informative analogues for the measures to be adopted or avoided when the attempt is made to raise the ethical standards of business. Given this focus on the professions, it will be argued that the usual, direct attempts to control unethical behaviour by using codes of ethics, legislation and self-regulatory regimes, are not successful. The answer, it will be argued, lies in using an enforced self-regulation model that aims for ethics indirectly. Such a strategy seeks to develop a goal-orientated professional culture which is actively promoted by the leadership of the profession as well as the members. Specifically, the culture is one that seeks to promote trust in the profession and trustworthiness as a virtue exemplified in each individual. It will be argued that in order to develop a professional culture that cultivates trust a profession will need to develop certain institutions, programs and structures within the profession. I conclude by setting out a model of these trust-cultivating structures.