Measuring Compliance: The Challenges in Assessing and Understanding the Interaction between Law and Organizational Misconduct

Abstract

A major question in corporate compliance research and practice is how to establish the effectiveness of compliance programs and policies on promoting desirable outcomes. To assess such effectiveness requires proper measurement. This chapter, which is the introduction to an edited volume on corporate compliance measurement, discusses the trade-offs involved in using different quantitative and qualitative approaches to measure corporate compliance and its predictors. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of different research strategies in terms of their validity in capturing behavioral responses, their ability to establish causality, their precision in showing complexity, their generalizability, and their feasibility and costeffectiveness. The chapter concludes that a mixed methods approach is the best way to reduce the trade-offs in measurement; using such an approach best accommodates the five quality standards of proper measurement.