Fonts d’exposició professional a radiacions òptiques

The above discussion has highlighted the various approaches to regulation from self- regulation to high levels of state intervention and the use of criminal prosecution. Gill (2000; 2002) and Edwards and Gill (2002) present a useful analytical framework within which regulation can be negotiated through the use of this admixture of enforcement and non- enforcement mechanisms. Figure 1 demonstrates this theoretical range of regulatory practices with the horizontal spectrum relating to the range of markets from the unambiguously legal to the illegal - ‘grey’ markets will be found in the middle of this spectrum - and the vertical spectrum relating to the range of possible official responses ranging from full enforcement to abnegation of any regulatory effort.

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Figure 1: Enforcement and non-enforcement mechanisms in legal and illegal markets (Gill, 2002: 535)

As figure 1 illustrates, at the top end of enforcement, sanctions are more likely to be criminal in relation to illegal markets and administrative/civil in relation to legal markets. The ellipses are therefore located correspondingly although as can be seen, the right hand edge of ‘prosecution’ and the left hand edge of ‘administrative/civil penalties’ indicate those cases where activities in legal markets may be prosecuted and where activities in illegal markets may be resolved through administrative/civil means. ‘Disruption’ of unambiguously legal markets by regulators is not necessary but disrupting criminal operations and markets is becoming increasingly attractive for police and custom agencies due to the higher costs of evidence gathering and the unpredictability of the outcomes of prosecution. Beneath this, the role of ‘cautioning’ to encourage traders to change their ways and which may be formally or informally used by police as a main alternative to prosecution, can be compared with regulators issuing ‘compliance notices’ in legal markets. ‘Licensing and taxing’, as indicated in the model, can represent varying degrees of formality where formal regulation is exercised over dangerous products that can be legally traded but require traders to have relevant licenses. Failure to comply in these cases can result in licence revocation. While

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illegal traders cannot be formally licensed, some circumstances occur whereby they may receive informal ‘licences’ from police or regulators as in the case of street traders who act as police informers. Such traders are vulnerable to sanctions and licence revocation.

In the bottom of half of the enforcement continuum, sanctions are not used at all. Within legal markets, ‘self-regulation’ in industry is considered the desired outcome of effective education and self-control. This suggests external, state regulation and intervention is not required or not feasible, which relates to arguments discussed above in relation to compliance. ‘Accommodation and collusion’ relates to the inadequate resources to pursue full enforcement that all regulatory agencies encounter. Consequently, prioritisation inevitably occurs meaning some illegal trading or regulation-avoidance takes place without a regulatory response. Thus, regulators may be aware of certain problematic activities but may be required to tolerate these where their benefits may outweigh their loss (Edwards, 2010). ‘Regulatory capture’ may occur due to shared ideology and/or personnel, rewards and/or threats resulting in traders ‘capturing’ the regulators and therefore ensuring non- enforcement. In some extreme cases, ‘ownership/control’ may even occur whereby the ‘regulators’ share in the profitability of the market. A key example of this would be the BAE Systems bribery scandal which involved a government to government arms contract between the UK and Saudi Arabia but enlisted BAE Systems as the arms producer and provider in this deal. The subsequent difficulties in investigating and prosecuting this case reflected this government-corporation relationship, amongst other factors. Thus, the conceptual framework outlined above is based on the idea that:

‘regulation is a social relationship that needs to be negotiated through a mixture of enforcement and alternatives to sanctions. A key implication of this premise is that reducing behaviour deemed problematic and harmful is unlikely to be accomplished through investment in practices of command and control alone, especially where resources for enforcement are economically, politically and/or culturally limited’ (Edwards, 2010: 44)

Thus, a variety of formal and informal practices may be adopted by regulators towards traders and markets. However, changes in the market depend not only on the actions of authorities but also on the adaptability and/or successful resistance of traders therefore such ‘negotiated relationships’ extend to a much broader range of interactions (Edwards and Gill, 2002: 215): this includes attempts by regulators to calculate likely outcomes of

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enforcement policies, costs of enforcement in relation to resources, civil rights and ethics (Beare and Naylor, 1999), as well as the study of ‘evolutionary struggles’ between cops and crooks’ that might be compared to arms races or the contest between intelligence and counterintelligence (Ekblom, 1999). This significant relationship between regulators and regulatees is also apparent in the ‘responsive regulation’ approach of Ayres and Braithwaite (1992). It is such processes at the operational level that appear vital in any regulatory approach. Clearly, markets can vary not only in terms of their degree of illegality – although discussing markets in terms of being a ‘bit illegal’ or ‘more illegal than legal’ is itself a difficult task – but also in terms of their size, scope, geography, type of actors and products involved, law invoked, and so on. The range of (non-)enforcement practices, however, can be applied to most regulatory problems. For example, by definition, corporate bribery is a market based activity given its location and role within financial markets and transactions and the use of such corruption to facilitate trading etc. This analytical framework will be applied to corporate bribery in this thesis.