The seminar presentation falls into two parts.
In the first part Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen presents the “ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) Enforcement and Compliance Project” – its theoretical ambitions, methodology, data and empirical findings. This part of the presentation puts together the findings and learnings from a long list of articles written by her Australian colleague, Christine Parker and Mrs Lehmann Nielsen. All the articles build upon data from the ACCC-research project.
Main focus will be on the newest – and not yet published – paper on business motivation for compliance and capacity. Previous research in regulatory compliance has often sought to create typologies of businesses with different motivations for compliance and non-compliance: such as amoral calculators versus good organizational citizens. Researchers, however, increasingly recognize that both individuals and business firms typically hold a range of potentially inconsistent goals and motivations relevant to compliance at once. In this paper the authors (Christine Parker and Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen) seek to develop a stringent motivational typology to conceptualize and measure prior business motivations (economic, social and normative motives) relevant to compliance behavior. We expect that individual businesses will have multiple motivations, but will prioritize some motives more highly than others. Through data on the thousand biggest companies in Australia we examine whether economic, social and normative motivations can be identified as separate dimensions or not. We go on to identify three different clusters of businesses that prioritize economic, social and normative motives in different ways: Social citizens, Good citizens and Dissenters.
In the second part Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen presents an idea for a new research project.
Bio: Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. She has been visiting Research Fellows at RegNet, Australian National University, and Texas A & M University. She researches and teaches in regulatory enforcement, compliance, public policy implementation and street-level bureaucratic behavior. Dr. Nielsen has published in international journals including Public Administration, Administration & Society, Regulation and Governance, and Law & Policy. She has published the following books in Danish (title translated from Danish): Price of Dialoque. Informal Rules, Asymmetry of Resources and Discimination in Regulatory Enforcement (Aarhus: Politica, 2002); and Implementation of Public Policy (with Soren Winter; Aarhus: Academica, 2008). Together with Christine Parker (Monash University) she has edited the book “Explaining Compliance. Business Responses to Regulation”(Edward Elgar, 2011).

http://seminars.acle.nl/