5/18/2014 Room for Manoeuvre? Regulatory Compliance in the Global Shipping Industry

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Source: 2012 Journal Citation Reports(Thomson Reuters, 2013)

Social & Legal Studies

sls.sagepub.com

Published online before print January 10, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0964663912467814Social Legal Studies June 2013 vol. 22 no. 2 171-189

Room for Manoeuvre? Regulatory

Compliance in the Global Shipping Industry

Michael Bloor

Cardiff University, UK

Helen Sampson

Cardiff University, UK

Susan Baker

Cardiff University, UK

David Walters

Cardiff University, UK

Katrin Dahlgren

U&W, Sweden

Emma Wadsworth

Cardiff University, UK

Philip James

Oxford Brookes University, UK

Michael Bloor, Seafarers International Research Centre, Cardiff University, CardiffCF10 3AT, UK. Email: BloorMJ@cf.ac.uk

Abstract

This article combines data from two separate studies of the shipping industry, one on

enforcement of new regulations on the use of low-sulphur fuel and one on supply chain

influences on ship operators health and safety policies and practices. The shipping

industry is a valuable natural laboratory for the study of patterns of compliance and

governance in late modernity because it is characterised both by highly developed

polycentric governance structures and by globalising economic processes including

vertically disaggregated global value chains, outsourcing and offshoring. Segmented

markets have permitted some blue riband companies to operate a social license

beyond compliance, and that such social licenses are more extensive in respect of

environment policies than in health and safety policies that may be attributed to

supply chain influences. Ship operators compliance is seen as a combination of

instrumental compliance, normative compliance, a taken for granted culture of

compliance and corporate policies of labour-force governance. A taken for granted

culture of compliance is identified as the main reason for compliance with the new low-

sulphur regulations, which are currently (uncharacteristically) subject to only limited

enforcement effort.

Compliance global governance polycentric governance

seafarers health and safety

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