Project description

A core problem in the study of law and behavior is how to measure illegal behavior. This project critically assesses the different methods that exist to study illegal corporate behavior across the social and behavioral sciences. It looks at the advantages and disadvantages of different methods, and the trade-offs of using single method approaches to study compliance. The project brings together leading compliance and white-collar crime scholars from across disciplines and methods in an edited volume, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. The project also draws on unique ethnographic work that shows the dynamic nature of compliance, and how this challenges traditional measurements that rely on surveys or governmental inspection data.

This project is a collaboration by Benjamin van Rooij (C-LAB), Melissa Rorie (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, criminology), and Wu Yunmei (Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, sociology).

Relevant publications and works in progress:

• van Rooij, Benjamin, and Melissa Rorie, eds. Measuring Compliance: Cambridge University Press, 2020 (in progress).
• van Rooij, Benjamin, Wu, Y., & Li, N. (2021). Compliance Ethnography: What gets lost in compliance measurement. In M. Rorie & B. Van Rooij (Eds.), Measuring Compliance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Wu, Yunmei, and Benjamin van Rooij. "Compliance Dynamism: Capturing the Polynormative and Situational Nature of Business Responses to Law." Journal of Business Ethics  (2019): 1-13.