Legal Compliance, Regulation, and Co-production

Abstract

Both the previous chapters have raised the issues of compliance and legal compulsion. In Chapter 1, a distinction was drawn between compliance, which was defined as people acting in accordance with agency requirements, and compulsion, which is only one of the reasons why people might comply. It was argued that in this context all co-production constitutes a form of compliance, since it entails contributing to agency purposes in response to some action or behaviour by the agency. The literature concerning legal compliance is therefore very relevant to the present inquiry, and especially to the question of what stimulates people to co-produce. Scholars in the social and human sciences have extensively researched the issue of why people comply with their legal obligations, and many of their findings offer suggestive insights for co-production research.