Compliance pluralisme and processes Understanding compliance behavior in restaurants in China

This research aimed to offer a case study of dynamic compliance processes in selected Chinese restaurants with the main methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews. It applied an integrated and dynamic research approach, called descriptive analysis of compliance behavior, which integrated the three mainstreaming approaches, endogenous, exogenous and process approaches together. Moreover, this approach attempted to offer an integrated view of compliance true to how it is experienced by the regulated actors, in terms of involving multiple laws that the regulated actors deal with in reality and analyzing the development of compliance over time, i.e. compliance changes in the business cycle from the start-up phase to daily operations.
This research first described the compliance behavior variation in two diverse restaurants and captured the complexity of compliance, second explained why this variation in compliance exists. It drawn on existing compliance studies focused on regulatory, organizational, and individual influences to understand which of these were at play in the varied compliance behavior studied.
It found that restaurants’ compliance behaviors are situated in their comprehensive legal knowledge, which deviated from the original written law and pointed to a different direction of compliance. Some organizational norms, including managerial, injunctive and descriptive norms, promote certain legally required behaviors, while some impede the compliance. At the individual level, both subjective explanations for their compliance behaviors and key individual compliance variables suggested in the exiting literature, including plural subjective deterrence, personal norms, descriptive norms, perceived obligation to obey the law, practical constraints, and recognition of legal requirement, are discussed and analyzed.