Understanding Styles of Corporate Compliance with Environmental Regulation: Towards a Multidimensional Conceptual Framework

This research applies the convergent insights of regulatory compliance and resource-dependence perspective to build a systematic framework of corporate compliance style (CCS thereafter). We use environmental regulation as the context of corporate compliance, and link corporate compliance with the levels of regulatory certainty and organizational nonmarket capabilities. We further develop a two dimensional model of CCS, based on which four scenarios of CCS are proposed, namely formalism, accommodation, referencing and self-determinism. We also discuss the applicability of our framework in a wide array of regulatory domains. This study hence extends the traditional compliance studies and provides a new perspective for the understanding of specific mechanisms that impact compliance behavioral patterns.