Examining Regulatory Encounters in Expert Work Settings

Bajpai, Kartikeya

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-85er-n922

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Examining Regulatory Encounters in Expert Work Settings

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This dissertation examines the interactional mechanisms that undergird exercises of regulatory authority in expert work settings. In the first chapter, I argue that, in the aftermath of a crisis (in this case, induced by a major regulatory event), organizational actors face environments of high uncertainty which challenge rational models of decision making, and, as a consequence, utilize emotion-based processes to navigate social interactions in crisis contexts. Specifically, I adopt an interactionist perspective to theorize and test how interaction-generated affective impressions guide social action (namely, social distancing and withdrawal) in the post-crisis period. Through an analysis of 0.8 million instant messages and 1.7 million emails exchanged by 107 employees of a hedge fund raided due to allegations of insider trading, I find that actors with low emotional competence experience greater post-raid distancing from peers and are more likely to exhibit withdrawal behaviors, as compared to those with high emotional competence. In contrast to the major regulatory event that animates the first study, in the second and third chapters, I focus on routine regulatory audit events that are enacted by compliance personnel within organizations to induce voluntary compliance in experts. Critics of the increasing important role of audits within organization argue that such regulatory interventions can be performative, dysfunctional and value-subverting. In Chapters 2 and 3, I empirically examine the functional and interactional bases of the monitoring and control of expert workers. I conducted a 19-month field study at a teaching hospital and examined its clinical documentation improvement program. The documentation program employs 20 regulatory nurses who monitor physician records and make voluntary compliance requests for document clarification from physicians. Across both chapters, a key idea is that regulatory agent-expert interactions are a critically important component of expert control processes (Huising 2015), as they can serve as a means of building relational trust and regulatory authority. In Chapter 2, I conduct a quantitative analysis of archival program data (25,000 regulatory request records) to establish the functional aspects of expert monitoring and control. Contrary to scholarship that suggests that auditing within organizations can often be symbolic in nature, I find that in-person regulatory requests are significantly more effective in achieving compliance as compared to electronic requests. In Chapter 3, I utilize qualitative and field research methods to further unpack the regulatory agent-expert worker interface. A prominent feature of scholarly critiques of audits within organizations is a focus on the loose coupling between audits on the books and on the ground to make a case that such regulatory interactions are largely rituals of inspection. My findings suggest, that in the context of expert work in organizations, the loose coupling between auditing structures and practices can be considered as a feature and not a bug. My analysis details how the structures and practices of different disciplinary and expertise-based groups within organizations, compel regulatory agents to adapt auditing guidelines and structures to expert work contexts. Further, in the context of organizational learning scholarship, my findings highlight the important role of regularized interactions between regulatory agents and expert workers in ‘nudging’ compliance and facilitating organizational learning.

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