Occupational licensure, including regulation of the professions, dates back to the medieval period. While the guilds that performed this regulatory function have long since vanished, professional regulation continues to this day. For instance, in the United States, 22 per cent of American workers must hold licenses simply to do their jobs. While long-established professions have more settled regulatory paradigms, the case studies in Paradoxes of Professional Regulation explore other professions, taking note of incompetent services and the serious risks they pose to the physical, mental, or emotional health, financial well-being, or legal status of uninformed consumers. Michael J. Trebilcock examines five case studies of the regulation of diverse professions, including alternative medicine, mental health care provision, financial planning, immigration consulting, and legal services. Noting the widely divergent approaches to the regulation of the same professions across different jurisdictions – paradoxes of professional regulation – the book is an attempt to develop a set of regulatory principles for the future. In its comparative approach, Paradoxes of Professional Regulation gets at the heart of the tensions influencing the regulatory landscape, and works toward practical lessons for bringing greater coherence to the way in which professions are regulated.

The Paradox of Regulation is a tour de force of regulatory scholarship that successfully contextualizes the regulatory project as an effort to reduce multiple forms of risk. Three case studies of regulatory reforms, fascinating in their own right, when read together forcefully demonstrate why context matters to the actuarial assessments, political realities, and possibilities for insuring safety, security and integrity. Haines, penetrating analysis presents no simple answers to what works and why. The Paradox of Regulation nimbly demonstrates that the strengths and limits of a particular regulatory reform must be understood as a complicated response to a dynamic constellation of actuarial, political, and socio-cultural risks.,- Nancy Reichman, University of Denver, US , This new book by Fiona Haines is an elegant but sophisticated analysis of the three risks (technical, social and political) that regulation must address if it is to be effective. This analysis is original and fresh bringing together critiques of risk based regulation with empirical literature on compliance and effectiveness evaluation. This is exactly the sort of book we need more of to develop and deepen empirical and theoretical research in regulatory scholarship: - it helpfully melds together different literatures and theoretical approaches with her own empirical work on regulatory reforms to build a multi-layered theoretical analysis that really pushes forward our understanding of regulation, why it happens and how it fails and succeeds., - Christine Parker, Monash University, Australia ,This is an insightful and nuanced analysis of the strengths and limitations of regulation. Through a close grained analysis of three recent disasters, Haines demonstrates that regulation is not just a technical but also a political and a social project and how a failure to recognise its multiple dimensions can lead to regulatory failure. This book is a major contribution that enriches our understanding of the challenges of risk management and of how best to address them.'- Neil Gunningham, Australian National University, Canberra , Fiona Haines shows us that regulatory policy is complex and paradoxical in ways that should require us to attend to the substance and the politics of specific regulatory regimes. This book is a major contribution to the reconceptualisation of risk and regulation. It is a perceptive treatment of the role of crisis by one of the best scholars of regulation we have., - John Braithwaite, Australian National University, Canberra

The regulatory state faces a set of paradoxes, in the form of strategies that achieve an end precisely opposite to the one intended. These include: (2) overregulation can produce underregulation; (2) stringent regulation of new risks can increase aggregate risk levels; (3) requiring the best available technology can retard technological development; (4) redistributive regulation can harm those at the bottom of the economic ladder; (5) disclosure requirements can make people less informed; and (6) independent agencies are not independent.

In the helping professions, codes of ethics and decision-making models have been the primary vehicles for determining what constitutes ethical practice. These strategies are insufficient since they assume that shared meanings exist and that the contradictory universal principles of codes can be reconciled. Also, these tools do not emphasize the significance of context for ethical practice. This book takes a new critical theoretical approach, which involves exploring how social workers construct what is ’ethical’ in their work, especially when they are positioned at the intersection of multiple paradoxes, including that of two opposing responsibilities in society: namely, to care for others but also to prevent others from harm. The book is built on narratives from actual front-line workers and therefore is more applicable and grounded for practitioners and students, offering many suggestions for sound practice. It illustrates that an understanding of ethics differs from worker to worker and is heavily influenced by context, workers’ values, and what they take up as the primary discourses that frame their perceptions of the profession. While recognizing the oppressive potential of social work, the book is rooted in a perspective that ethical practice can contribute to a more socially just society.

The notion of paradox dates back to ancient philosophy, yet only recently have scholars started to explore this idea in organizational phenomena. Two decades ago, a handful of provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox, and thereby deepen our understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions in organizational life. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over the past two decades, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. These studies have explored such tensions as today and tomorrow, global integration and local distinctions, collaboration and competition, self and others, mission and markets. Yet even with both the depth and breadth of interest in organizational paradoxes, key issues around definitions and application remain. This handbook seeks to aid, engage, and fuel the expanding interest in organizational paradox. Contributions to this volume depict how paradox studies inform, and are informed, by other theoretical perspectives, while creating a resource that enables scholars to learn about and apply this lens across varied organizational phenomena. The increasing complexity, volatility, and ambiguity in our world continually surfaces paradoxical dynamics. Thus, this handbook offers insights to scholars across organizational theory.

Paradoxes emerge everywhere in organizational theory and management practice. This book is a theoretically grounded presentation of the strategic and historical context of organizational paradoxes, exploring the paradoxes in organizational management and the available tactics to manage them. Based on 700 academic sources in the paradox literature, it presents paradox management as a nuanced and coherent perspective. In presenting and integrating the vast literature on the subject, it contributes new knowledge on how and why the paradox concept was introduced into management theory, how and why conflicting ideals of management can produce organizational contradictions, and how paradoxes can be managed.