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649 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2013)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0649 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION
Organizational
Challenges to
Regulatory
Enforcement
and
Compliance:
A New
Common Sense
about
Regulation
By
SUSAN S. SILBEY

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-
first century, following an escalating series
of global financial and economic crises, we hear
renewed calls for government regulation as a
necessary, if not entirely sufficient, safeguard
against the excesses of exuberant capitalism. At
the same time as some policy advocates urge
increased regulation, opponents claim that it is
not capitalism nor the market that is the cause
of these crises; instead, they argue, government
regulation not only dampens market efficien-
cies and retards economic growth but encour-
ages the predatory and fraudulent practices
responsible for the recent Great Recession.
For some observers, this contested account
of twentieth-century government regulation
indicates both the zenith and decline of the
modern nation-state. After four centuries of
what seemed like increasingly competent cen-
tralized governments that were able to provide
surer stability and security for their citizens,1
the rise and then fall of the regulatory state,
perhaps more than any other indicator, signals
institutional transformations, which reached
their apex at the end of the last century. Active,
expert-based government oversight and inter-
vention, which in the United States had begun
with the early-twentieth-century progressives,
not only constrained industrial and financial
hazards-such as industrial accidents and child
labor-but also produced, by the 1970s, the
largest equalization of social status in historic
record. This included significant increases in
longevity and literacy as well as general health
and well-being. In reaction to the redistribution
Susan S. Silbey is the Leon and Anne Goldberg
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at MIT She
writes about the ways legal culture becomes embedded
in routines of everyday life. Her current work looks at
the limits of accountability in complex organizations,
with special attention to scientists and laboratories.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716213493066

ANNALS, AAPSS, 649, September 2013

6

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