From command-and-control to corporate self-regulation: How legal discourse and practice shape regulatory reform

This dissertation seeks to illuminate contemporary practices of self-regulatory governance through an analysis of the regulatory reform debate that produced them and the social relationships in which they are embedded. It examines recent transformations in the regulatory field and how these changes have shaped and been shaped by existing regulatory practices and institutions. The first part of the dissertation documents the legal community's changing views of regulation through a content analysis of nearly 1,400 law review articles to show how legal institutions and the interests of the legal profession mediate the impact of economic ideas in the debate on regulatory reform. I draw on the concept of justification to explain how the legal logic of the regulatory field engages with economic critiques of regulation to produce self-regulation as an outcome. This portion of the dissertation speaks to how self-regulation reorganizes the way participants in the regulatory field think what kind of regulation is possible and desirable. In the second section of the dissertation, I present an empirical case study to demonstrate how self-regulation re-configures the relationships that comprise the regulatory field and how self-regulation is itself shaped by the existing logics of the regulatory field. Using the results of a large-scale quantitative study of a self-policing program at the Environmental Protection Agency, I demonstrate that self-regulation has the potential to improve compliance at regulated companies, but that these gains are realized only within the context of a robust, and sometimes coercive, enforcement regime. These findings illustrate how self-regulatory practices are shaped and constrained by existing regulatory institutions and suggest the limitations and possibilities of employing self-regulation as a governance model.