This book explores how small businesses respond to the law. By detailing the intricate ways in which businesses come to comply with or violate legal regulations, it shows a very different picture of compliance that completely changes the way we think about how businesses respond to the law, how we can capture such responses, and what explains their behaviors. The book moves us beyond a static and single-perspective approach to compliance, where firms are seen as obeying or breaking a specific rule at a specific point in time. Instead, it offers a dynamic view of compliance as it manifests in daily business, where firms must comply with a host of legal rules and must do so over a long period of time. This timely book is especially valuable to three main groups: to compliance practitioners and regulatory enforcement agents, who are increasingly forced to consider how compliance management and enforcement practices actually affect compliance; to regulatorygovernance scholars (in public administration, law, sociology, and management science), for whom compliance is a central aspect; and to scholars of Chinese law, who realize that compliance is a central challenge that the Chinese legal system must overcome.

Develops a unique ethnographic approach to compliance that captures how businesses truly respond to legal rules on a day-to-day basis Provides the first critique of current compliance measurements and compliance theories, which fail to capture the dynamic nature of compliance as it manifests in the reality of small firms Develops a three-level model of compliance that integrates regulatory, firm, and individual processes Is a study of compliance based on three years of participant observation in the day-to-day functioning of small businesses

Autorentext

Dr. Yunmei Wu is currently an associate researcher at Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from The Netherlands China Law Centre, Faculty of law, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has published several papers related to compliance and regulation in China in several English journals like the Journal of Business Ethics, The China Journal, Pace Environmental Law Review, etc.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Compliance Behaviors.- Explaining Compliance Behaviors.- References.- Appendixes.