Good people doing bad things: Compliance regimes in organisations

Abstract: Nearly all major corporations and many public agencies have established ‘Ethics and Compliance’ departments, some of them as the result of penalties imposed by the US Department of Justice, others due to embarrassing scandals. The responsibilities of these departments include inculcating codes of ethical conduct, preventing risk of bribery or corruption, dealing with litigation for harassment and bribery accusations, and ensuring that applicable laws, government certifications and branch standards are followed. For the compliance officer in such organisations, breaches of ethics are not due to unethical persons, but to inadequate compliance training. This article, based on fieldwork in compliance training conferences, anti-corruption events and readings of ethics and compliance manuals, describes how a ‘culture of compliance’ is pursued in organisations. In the wake of continuing ethics breaches, debates center around whether compliance regimes to be considered genuine efforts to ‘do the right thing’, or simply a façade to improve firms’ reputations. This chapter argues that compliance regimes can be both real and fake. The role of the compliance function is to mediate the real social tension about when compliance should be strict, and when rules can be ignored.