Responsive regulation usually boils down to the assumption that enforcers should not shift to coercing before it has become clear that persuading does not work. This presupposes that it is possible to determine what the correct enforcement style is, that enforcers can apply the most suitable style, and that enforcers control the negative unintended consequences of their conduct. We have studied the applicability of these presuppositions at the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority by way of observations, interviews, and a survey. The applicability of all three presuppositions has proven problematic; enforcement agents apply different styles in comparable cases; they are impeded in applying the most appropriate style; and they do not control the perverse consequences of their conduct because regulatees tend to perceive it as more coercive than intended by inspectors. Our findings are not unique to this inspectorate and hence raise questions about the applicability of the theory of responsive regulation.
Research from the Netherlands has pointed out that the increased popularity of New Age since the 1960s by no means compensates for the dramatic decline of the Christian churches. From a theoretical point of view, however, it is more important to study why those remarkably divergent developments have occurred in the first place. This article does this by analyzing survey data collected among the Dutch population at large in 1998, focusing on a comparison of the young and the elderly. It is concluded, first, that there are no indications that the decline of the Christian tradition has been caused by a process of rationalization. Second, the decline of the Christian tradition and the growth of nonreligiosity as well as New Age are caused by increased levels of moral individualism (individualization). Implications for the sociological analysis of cultural and religious change are discussed.If we have to make one element of modernization central to understanding the nature of modern religion, it would be that which explains the rise of the sect, the tolerance at the heart of the denomination, and the amorphous nature of the cult: individualism. (Bruce 1995:428)
Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970-1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion among the remaining faithful and by increased polarization about this with the nonreligious. Religious decline and religious privatization, two of the most crucial dimensions of secularization (Casanova 1994), hence develop dialectically: as the number of Christians declines, the remaining faithful seem increasingly unwilling to accept the "secularist truce"-the secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm.
Although responsive regulation includes much more than the enforcement pyramid, it is the pyramid that has received most attention from academics and practitioners. This is despite the fact that the implementation of the strategy of gradual escalation has proved challenging in many respects. Why has the enforcement pyramid been so attractive? Apart from its scholarly and policy usefulness, this paper suggests that it appeals to practitioners because it provides a theoretical endorsement of the professional autonomy to which practitioners aspire. It was, and is, still appealing to scholars because it provides a practical means to improve regulation, which is congruent with the dominant neoliberal reflex to depoliticize the regulation of capitalist economies. All in all, because responsive regulation has very largely been reduced to the enforcement pyramid, the literature has neglected the normative issues surrounding the regulation of capitalist economies that were central to Ayres and Braithwaite.
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