Unpacking the Emotion of Shame in Governing Corporate Crime in 21st Century Markets

Paper proposal for Panel 10 Affect in Regulatory Governance and Policymaking chaired by: Dovilė Rimkutė & Claudio Radaelli Shame has been a prominent emotion on the agenda of regulatory governance scholars since the inception of the discipline (and before). ‘Naming and shaming’ exposes bad behaviour of an alleged business offender by publicly naming and blaming them, embarrassing them into shame – a process that is assumed to stimulate targeted offenders to comply with social and legal norms. Shame and shaming were cornerstones in Ayres and Braithwaite’s Responsive Regulation (1992). The same period saw a flourishing scholarship on regulatory transparency in public administration (Fung, Graham & Weil 2009); reputational sanctions in law and economics (Kahan & Posner 1999; Karpoff et al 2005), and adverse corporate publicity in criminology (Levi 2008, 2009; Van Erp 2010; 2011). These different strands of research have in common that they draw upon the power of shame in organizations and markets, yet the interdisciplinary connection between the emotion of shame, and the sociology and economy of corporate reputation, has not been made explicit. Moreover, this scholarship requires actualization, as it dates predominantly from before the internet and social media came to offer unparalleled opportunities for global shaming. As much as shame is still one of the most prominent strategies of social control in the 21st century however, the world faces an ‘epidemic of shamelessness’ as well (Keen 2023). All in all, modern shaming remains poorly understood theoretically and empirically as a strategy of corporate social control. This paper aims to present a renewed theory of naming and shaming in regulatory governance, integrating scholarship from different (sub)disciplines of the social sciences and setting the agenda for future scholarship. It draws upon two main bodies of scholarship that have not previously been connected with shaming in regulatory governance: Institutional and stakeholder theories, and international relations theory. Institutional theory regards reputations as social constructions, and shaming as a process in which shaming targets are actively produced in interactions between social activists, corporations, state institutions, media and consumers. Thus, shaming links corporate actors to systemic problems as a way to draw attention to such problems. Media and audience dynamics become more relevant as they co-produce meaning. International relations scholarship understands shaming as a political leverage strategy (Terman 2023), harnessing the power of social norms in a discursive process of socialization depicted as a ‘spiral effect’. Both scholarships point to the moral and rhetorical power of shaming, in contrast with more instrumental and economic understandings in regulatory governance work. Translating these theories to regulatory governance of corporations in markets does more justice to the affective nature of shame and shaming and responds to calls to take emotions serious within governance.