• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

information for practice

news, new scholarship & more from around the world


advanced search
  • gary.holden@nyu.edu
  • @ Info4Practice
  • Archive
  • About
  • Help
  • Browse Key Journals
  • RSS Feeds

Bureaucratic Control and Strategic Compliance: How Do Subnational Governments Implement Central Guidelines in China?

Abstract

Bureaucratic control, the constraint that a superior imposes on subordinate agencies’ discretion through guidelines, is ubiquitous in administrative organizations. Despite scholarly discussions on the merits and shortcomings of bureaucratic control, we still know little about the impact of the extents of bureaucratic control on subordinates’ compliance patterns. In this article, we argue that bureaucratic control might intensify subordinates’ burdens and incentivize them to strategically reduce compliance with the central guidelines which impose such control on them. We build a database containing 42 social regulatory guidelines issued by the Chinese State Council (central government) and 848 implementation documents issued by provincial governments between 2003 and 2012. As bureaucratic control in a central guideline increases, provincial governments might postpone the release or withhold the implementation documents and reiterate less content of the corresponding central guideline. Interestingly, when provincial governments lack financial resources, the aforementioned reactions to bureaucratic control is weakened and even reversed to be positive. Moreover, central mobilization alleviates the negative impact of bureaucratic control on the surface but might fail to address subordinates’ decrease of compliance in hidden ways. Central monitoring raises the overall level of subordinates’ compliance but does not moderate how subordinates circumvent central guidelines with high degree of control.

Read the full article ›

Posted in: Journal Article Abstracts on 07/21/2021 | Link to this post on IFP |
Share

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Category RSS Feeds

  • Calls & Consultations
  • Clinical Trials
  • Funding
  • Grey Literature
  • Guidelines Plus
  • History
  • Infographics
  • Journal Article Abstracts
  • Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews
  • Monographs & Edited Collections
  • News
  • Open Access Journal Articles
  • Podcasts
  • Video

© 1993-2023 Dr. Gary Holden. All rights reserved.

gary.holden@nyu.edu
@Info4Practice