Producing Compliance

Organizations, to comply with regulations and growing prosocial demands, develop robust accountability infrastructures: offices, techno-legal experts, programs, operating procedures, technologies, and tools dedicated to keeping the organization's operations in line with regulations and external standards. Although an organization has a single, unified accountability infrastructure—one program, one set of policies and procedures, and so on for environmental management, or health and safety, or risk management—this infrastructure must produce compliance across a dynamic, complex organization. This happens when and because compliance managers and officers make a single, unified accountability infrastructure multiple and diverse in its day-to-day implementation. This approach to compliance work is pragmatic in the sense that rules and requirements are altered based on a deep understanding of regulatory expectations, local operations, and local work cultures. It depends on the skilled interpretation and adaptation of regulation and narration of compliance.