Shifting Alliances in the Accreditation of Higher Education: On the ...

United States can be expected to have been confined largely to standard-setting
contexts.‖ 37
There are several reasons why the firms within a given industry might choose to
self-regulate. In the case of standard setting, the most common justification is the need to
create and maintain interoperability among products and components. The government is
ill-equipped to set many of these standards, the argument goes, due to a lack of technical
expertise. Although regulatory agencies do exist, it is often argued that they have
difficulty responding rapidly to changes, that they are highly inflexible, 38 and that civil
service rules and procedural requirements which exist to ensure fairness in the hiring and
firing of staff make it almost impossible for regulatory agencies to assemble a staff ―with
sufficient expertise to access fully the implications of innovative scientific research or
novel technologies.‖ 39
Additionally, it is argued that the government is unable to keep up with all of the
different things it is supposed to be regulating; 40 Gunningham and Rees refer to this as
regulatory overload. 41 Self-regulation, then, is seen as releasing the government from an
unmanageable burden.
Gunningham and Rees note that another reason that is commonly given for why
firms choose to self-regulate is that industry self-regulation can be used as a preemptive
strategy; by self-regulating they may hope to design less strict and onerous rules than the
37
Ibid.
38
Dara O‘Rourke, ―Outsourcing Regulation: Analyzing Nongovernmental Systems of Labor Standards and
Monitoring,‖ The Policy Studies Journal 31, No. 1, (2003): 5.
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/orourke/PDF/OutSourcingReg-PSJ.pdf
39
Weimer, ‖The Puzzle of Private Rulemaking,‖ 569.
40
O‘Rourke, ―Outsourcing Regulation,‖ 1.
41
Gunningham and Rees, ―Industry Self-Regulation,‖ 363.
25