Compliance-Conformity-Convenience

This chapter reviews and analyzes the various perspectives on corporate conformity, compliance, and convenience. Corporate compliance and conformity are both matters of issue salience and profitability in terms of benefits exceeding cost. Such issues are explicitly linked to perceived social norms, public expectation of how companies “should” or might operate in terms of business practice, an expectation frequently interpreted by corporations as normative pressure. Here, normative pressures are interpreted as socially derived expectations, a multiplicity of different expectations from a plurality of institutional and ethical demands. The chapter develops to cover, inter alia, remaking capitalism for social acceptance, responses to normative pressures, legalistic and formalistic approaches, and organizational deviance and failure in terms of risk and fraud.