Keywords

5.1 Introduction

The interrogation of safety-related behavior from different disciplinary perspectives can allow for familiar issues to be examined in a new light, and draw attention to the organizing assumptions that shape and limit the ways the field of study is perceived. While consideration of organizational compliance has traditionally fallen within the disciplinary domain of regulatory studies, it has also long been of interest to criminologists, whose focus on crime and offending has encompassed a concern with rule-breaking within organizational contexts [1]. The criminology of corporate offending provides insights into the conditions and circumstances in which behavioral “deviance” occurs within organizations, and thus has a lot to offer in trying to understand why practices might depart from established rules. Within the context of this collection’s focus on the differences between compliance-based safety processes (or safety “work-as-imagined”) and initiative-based safety behaviors (or safety “work-as-done” [2]), this becomes particularly valuable in thinking about the role of individual decision-makers in the shift from one to the other.

Adopting an approach that starts by thinking about such shifts as a form of “deviance” or criminality might seem antithetical to safety science’s prioritization of learning-oriented safety cultures over the pursuit of punishment or blame in safety-critical settings like healthcare, aviation, and other high-hazard industries [3, 4]. But it should be noted that this criminological focus is not solely (or even primarily) concerned with criminal deviance per se; rather, because it is acutely aware of the constructed and contingent nature of criminalization, it has a broader interest in what drives deviations in behavior, such as organizational rule violations, and in the ways that this is responded to, via reactions both internal and external to the organization. It is also interested in the interplay between individual motivations (agency) and organizational power relations and context (structure) in shaping these behaviors, and particularly in relation to middle-managers. Criminological approaches to these issues will be set out, and their relevance to the compliance/initiative debate highlighted. Specifically, three analytical themes will be explored: the ambiguities of meaning that exist within regulatory processes; the structural uncoupling that can occur between individuals and organizations; and the autonomy deficits encountered by those who turn imagined work into work done.

5.2 The Importance of Middle-Management

It is worth briefly explaining why this contribution has focused on middle-management and how this relates to the collection’s focus on the articulation between compliance and initiative in safety. Criminology typically takes a subject-oriented approach to questions of collective and institutional behavior, drawing on the interactionist traditions of the discipline [2: 168], and this is reflected in the attention paid to both corporate crime as a matter of offending both by and within organizational settings, but also to white-collar offending as a form of individualized rule-breaking occurring in these settings [5]. This dual model of thinking about “deviant” corporate behavior as something that occurs at the intersection of organizational and individual action draws the focus toward middle-managers, the critical decision-making individuals exercising professional autonomy at the intersection of organizational policy and practice. Their status as intermediaries who act on behalf of organizations, but also as independent actors, makes them a natural locus for assessment of the “work-as-imagined/work-as-done” dichotomy. There is a strong tradition of analyzing the role of “sociological citizens” who occupy intermediary positions of this sort, particularly due to the interactional influence they wield [6].

Corporate criminological analysis identifies that organizations are often characterized by fundamental tensions over the distribution of responsibility and autonomy within their structures. This tends to place responsibilities for issues like safety into the hands of frontline individual employees and, in doing so, shifts responsibility away from the organization itself. At the same time, however, these frontline actors are often not equipped with a level of autonomy commensurate with that responsibility, and so cannot truly act with authority in the areas that are their responsibility [7–9]. One result of this is that accountability processes tend to focus on individuals and leave deficits at the organizational level. So when we analyze the relationship between “work-as-imagined” and “work-as-done”, we are also interrogating the distribution of responsibility, agency, and accountability, and it is at the level of middle-management that these distributions intersect. Initiative-based safety behaviors involve the exercise of agency in choosing to depart from compliance with established safety policy, but render those who use that agency in order to discharge their responsibilities accountable for having done so.

It is worth mentioning at this point that “compliance” has a different meaning in relation to the concept of compliance-based safety (obedience to written rules) that forms the basis of “work-as-imagined” than it does in relation to corporate criminology, where “compliance” is generally taken to refer to processes of adopting flexible, self-determined, self-regulatory measures by organizations in order to meet their legal obligations in ways that suit their needs; quite the opposite of following prescriptive standards and obligations. Terms like “compliance” and “innovation” are thus complex and do not necessarily impose universal value judgements in terms of their desirability. So while some criminological explanations of “non-compliance” may derive from unlawful offending, their application within the context of “work-as-done” need not necessarily judge behavior as “criminal” in the same way. In that sense, we are learning from criminological explanations of deviation from formal expectation or rules, rather than of crime.

5.3 Foundations of the Corporate Criminological Tradition

Two longstanding, and normatively very different, traditions within corporate criminology have both tended to regard offending behavior as a product of motivation and the choices, desires, and interests of those who perpetrate it, albeit that these choices are shaped and constrained by social interactions and contextual factors. Each approach emphasizes the importance of the choices made by different actors to deviate from rules, but interpret those choices in different ways.

5.3.1 Individual Motivations

One strand of corporate criminology has drawn on broader individualistic and rationalistic “motivational” explanatory factors of human behavior. On this view, managerial offending results from a failure to contain the tendencies of “bad actors” within corporate settings. These actors make rationally informed choices to engage in non-compliant, or “deviant”, behavior on the basis of assessments of strategic benefit and the likelihood of detection, but also their internal capacities, including a lack of individual self-control, or capacity to inhibit impulsive and risk-taking behaviors when presented with opportunities [10, 11], and of their individual risk factors, such as childhood conduct disorders, exclusion from school and structured working opportunity [10], or deficit of control in their life [11]. Lastly, elements of personality, such as psychopathic personality disorders (resulting in disinhibited, egocentric, and manipulative behavior, and a lack of remorse) and anomic reactions to blocked opportunities to conform to professional values are also associated with offending [1: 170].

Rational-choice-based explanations of middle-managerial offending behavior suggest that a decision to deviate from a compliance-based approach to safety and exercise initiative would tend to derive from the risk-taking, impulsive, and disinhibited nature of the individual who takes that decision; it reflects a tendency toward ungovernability and a disregard for, or inability to cope with, authority and supervision. Initiative-based safety would thus occur as product of the way that risk managers with this type of personality presentation would deal with obstacles, problems, or opportunities. At the same time, however, this same “ungovernable” risk-taking tendency also predominates among entrepreneurs, political and technological disruptors, and “innovators” of all sorts, suggesting that the presence of middle-managers who take such an approach can be an asset rather than a liability. In any case, individualistic explanations alone fail to explain differentiated distributions of deviating behaviors, collective or systemic offending, and how “ungovernable” individuals manage to reach positions of workplace authority, suggesting a broader set of factors are at play.

5.3.2 Organizational Motivations

The antithesis of “bad actor” individual-based explanations are those relating to “bad organizations”, which attribute departures from behavioral norms to the self-interested tendencies of corporate actors themselves. This represents a more critical corporate criminology tradition, regarding organizational offending as a product of the criminogenic structural necessities of contemporary capitalism [12], or of the influence of industry-wide cultures of motivation, opportunity, and control [13]. Clinard’s classic study of middle-management offending identified a range of internal corporate factors as drivers of deviant behavior, with the most important being the decisive role of top management in setting ethical standards and placing performance pressure onto middle-managers [10, 14]. Further, structured anomic discrepancies can arise between cultural social norms and the institutional capacity of firms to abide by these norms; rule-breaking arises where organizations encounter pressures (recession, economic distress, political pressure) that undermine their ability to meet the expectations of investors, customers, and the law [15]. In both cases, hierarchical and contextual pressure overrides the capacity of individual actors to exercise moral decision-making in order to achieve organizational goals. Individuals are less ungoverned risk-takers, and more victims of the systems they are part of.

Corporate criminology usually views this dynamic operating in relation to large-scale breaches of the law, and as such, tends to be suspicious of regulation and business-led voluntarism [1: 170]. But it may also prompt innovation-based responses to safety challenges. Organizational motives for (non-) compliance extend beyond the “economic rationality” assumed by critical theorists, to encompass normative and social drivers such as an internalized commitment to obeying the law (a “duty to comply”), and externalized concerns around reputation and the social license to operate [16]. Corporate actors follow formal policy and rules because doing so leads to the fulfillment of these underlying interests, and so they are perceived as legitimate. They depart from rules and compliance behaviors when they are seen as ineffective and so illegitimate. On this account, the adoption of initiative-based safety behaviors by middle-managers reflects the limits of rules as a means of fulfilling the “best interests” of the corporation, either because those interests involve rule violations, or because the rules do not work.

5.4 Connective Factors: Key Insights from Criminology

As discussed previously, middle-management decision-makers are of particular relevance to the tensions between compliance-based and initiative-based safety behaviors precisely because they occupy an intermediary role, translating hierarchical organizational requirements into action and formalizing issues identified through frontline practice. Most accounts of corporate offending, and of middle-management offenders, emphasize the cultural interactions between these two levels of action—a clash between the structural and the agentic which gives rise to a culture characterized by disconnections within which deviations from expected behavior can occur. Three types of disconnection are identified here, relating to ambiguities of meaning, to structural uncouplings, and to autonomy deficits.

5.4.1 Ambiguities of Meaning

Middle-managers sit at a “between-point” within organizations, and thus have to negotiate meaning as ideas, initiatives, and imperatives pass up and down the hierarchy of the corporation. In doing so, these meanings give rise to ambiguities and areas of uncertainty, as the gaps between layers of the hierarchy open up, and these intermediary actors are charged with closing those gaps. A safety policy may lack sufficient detail to deal with a problem encountered in practice, or two different policies may contradict one another. For instance, should workers at height follow rules about wearing protective eyewear, even in rainy weather when droplets on the goggles obscure their vision? Does the safety benefit of non-compliance outweigh the risk that the rule was meant to control? Sometimes ambiguities reflect the presence of “principled disagreements” and “incompetence” within firms or in relation to their attitude to legal requirements [17], but more often, they emerge from the spaces that the autonomy of middle-management allows for—gaps in processes of surveillance and reporting, or contestations around what compliance with rules actually entails [14: Chap. 8]. Rules create uncertainty, and it falls to intermediary actors to resolve ambiguities via processes of “legal endogeneity” which allow for the blurring of organizational and legal logics and the complication of compliance [18].

Two key points are worth emphasizing. First, ambiguities may be presented as if they are unfortunate by-products of complexity, but in actual fact they are often manufactured, and sometimes deliberately; ambiguity over the scope and reach of a rule, over how it is monitored, and over the way that responsibility for departure from it might be attributed, often results from calculated choices on the part of rule-makers [1: 174–5]. For example, the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK, where a blaze in a high-rise residential block caused 72 deaths, demonstrated that regulatory systems, organizational processes and decisions, and legal rules governing fire safety and product approval, were all constructed in ways that sought to increase flexibility and reduce regulatory burdens, but also served to disperse responsibility and reduce accountability for the decisions that contributed to the fire [19]. Here, as elsewhere, middle-managers were partly capitalizing on the gaps to innovate away from compliance with safety rules, and partly in filling these gaps with new (and more favorable) rules. Second, ambiguities exist at levels above that of tasks, roles, and organizations. Those that arise within broader industries, sectors, and regulatory contexts play a major role in shaping employee behaviors, as in the example of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill [13], where the industry culture implicitly tolerated non-compliance with rules and regulations, seeing it as a by-product of doing business and so giving rise to ambiguities of motivation, opportunity, and control.

5.4.2 Structural Uncoupling

A second connective driver of middle-management departure from rule-compliance lies in the structural uncoupling of the goals and interests of the organization from those of the individuals within it. In criminological terms, breaches of rules arise as an unintentional outcome of the breakdown of organizational dynamics, including system inertia, unnoticed breakdowns within complex bureaucratic structures, and the “normalization” of offending within the business environment [14, 20]. Within complex organizational systems, structure and hierarchy create differentiations between individual and group interests that tolerate or encourage behavioral departures. The organization comes to prioritize something that is incompatible with the “normal” values of individuals, and may depart from social and legal norms, and so individuals are either socialized into identifying with organizational goals [10: 537], or have to resolve this difference either by departing from organizational values or by reconciling themselves to them. The criminological term for this type of uncoupling is “differential association”, social learning processes through which meanings that run counter to formal norms are internalized among individuals within that relational context. Differential associations within corporate settings have been seen to arise via sociocultural factors, such as gender, organizational identity, and organizational cultures [10, 14, 20].

Two responses to this type of uncoupling are possible. One is that individuals pursue their own values and interests, or those of subgroups that they are socialized into, rather than those of the organization. As an example, individuals within functionally- or locationally defined teams or groups may develop their own safety practices and ways of working that depart quite radically from the organization’s formal safety rules. This might be because those rules are perceived as inadequate in reflecting the needs of the job, or the group might “deviate” away from a commitment to safety altogether. The second type of reaction to differential associations is the use of “techniques of neutralization”, or justifications and rationalizations that individuals draw on to avoid acknowledging that they are committing acts of wrongdoing to fulfill organizational requirements [20, 21]. By rationalizing behavior that departs from rules as “normal” for the team/organization/sector, or as harmless, or as taken-for-granted organizational practices, individual employees avoid recognizing their actions as unethical and/or illegal, and reconcile their own beliefs to the contextual norms of non-compliance [20, 21]. The uncoupling of individual and organizational values creates a space within which behaviors can depart, for good or ill, from “work-as-imagined”.

5.4.3 Autonomy Deficits

Lastly, while the granting of autonomy or space to exercise decision-making capacity is a defining feature of middle-management, and so links to the presence of ambiguities and uncouplings, it also acts as a driver of behavioral deviation by virtue of its absence. Flexibility and accountability exist in a tension within organizational and regulatory systems [22]; the appropriate allocation of autonomy is necessary to ensure that operational individuals are empowered to take decisions and respond to problems, but that these decisions are appropriately owned by, and subject to the oversight of, the organization. Middle-managers with safety responsibilities generally possess agency to go beyond their immediate contexts and to experiment and adapt in order to fulfill their professional roles; they must be aware that they have the capacity and the authority to do so, and they must have dialogic relationships with organizational systems that are responsive to, learn from, and take ownership of, their actions in order to manage safety risks appropriately [6, 7: 9]. But while autonomy is central to the successful operation of complex systems, it also presents risks to organizations and so tends to be managed closely. Organizational desires for internal accountability and external legitimacy both serve as drivers toward the use of mechanisms such as audit and monitoring, and certification or standardization, that curtail autonomy and exercise power over individual action [23]. One result of this quest for control is that individual managers may not possess the authority needed to perform the role they are responsible for; departures from compliance with formal rules arise as a means of getting things done within the restrictive parameters the organization sets.

More significantly, because these processes of accountability focus on the visible measurement and signaling of attitudes of compliance with law and commitment to safety discourse, they turn the exercise of individual autonomy into an issue of responsibility—and subsequently view “work-as-done” and initiative-based behavior as managerial deviance rather than as reflective of systemic or structural issues [7–9]. The reasons for departure from rules are smoothed away, and individual decisions are purposely not “owned” by organizational procedures and policies, because to acknowledge complexity and “real problems” in the work environment would undermine organizational claims as to certainty, control, and legitimacy [23: 1028]. Crucially, while middle-managers are given responsibility for operational performance and outcome delivery, and bear individual accountability for failures and breaches of rules, they are not given the authority or capacity to fulfill these roles and may be disavowed by the organization when they do; this hierarchical distance insulates managerial levels of the organization from similar exposure to responsibility for risk at the front line [7: 14]. Prosocial rule-breaking also reflect the same processes of “responsibilization” and insulation [8]; going “beyond compliance” to implement higher standards than required, acting as a whistleblower to externalize concerns about non-compliance, and acting as regulatory intermediaries to implement requirements at the local level, reflect the same absence of autonomy within the middle-manager role [6].

5.5 Conclusion

The crucial lesson about “work-as-done” and “work-as-imagined” to be taken from criminological research is that departures from formalized rules, regulations, or practices occur as a result of the ways that individual and organizational factors interact within our prevailing regulatory governance culture. Flexibility, diffusion, and empowerment are central to the creation of embedded, self-regulating safety cultures and practices, but they also create ambiguities of scope, structural uncouplings, and autonomy deficits. Responsibility for compliance and rule-following are distributed downward to the levels of the organization where knowledge and involvement are pooled and where implementation can be effectively owned (decisions should be made at the “lowest competent level”). But across all three of these headings (ambiguity, uncoupling, autonomy), the responsibility that middle-managers are given for the implementation of safety management is restricted by the constraints that organizational power structures introduce. Oversight methods such as layered systems of audit and monitoring, create conditions for ambiguity and uncoupling (between practice and reported practice) to exist, and contain responsibility for them at the operational level and in the hands of middle-managers [23]. And processes of accountability-allocation locate responsibility for departures from policy and rules, as well as failures and deviations from safe practice, at lower levels of organizations, while the authority and autonomy to exercise responsibility effectively are retained at the top-tiers [7]. It is the failure of organizational power structures to integrate these levels that leads to middle-management rule deviation.