Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
Corporate compliance relies on an intricate network of individuals and organizations to monitor and report wrongdoing. Compliance improves our collective well-being by curbing corporate misconduct and by facilitating the freer flow of information.
Despite notable failures, compliance has thrived over the past three decades, becoming a well-respected element of corporate governance. Now, however, compliance faces a new challenge, as polarization has become the norm in American life. Political parties have grown more ideologically homogeneous, and politicians embrace more extreme variations of the positions they supported just a few years ago. Partisan thinking has moved beyond discrete political debates, spreading to the places where people live, socialize, and work. As it has done so, it has magnified hostility and tribalism.
Networks create value when they diffuse information promptly and efficiently. Polarization damages compliance’s relational nodes and undermines the critical thinking and risk-assessment skills so crucial to its long-term success. Accordingly, if the compliance network is to survive, it must reorganize and reframe itself for a more polarized world. This Article problematizes polarization’s impact on compliance and then pivots to consider compliance’s best strategies for withstanding and responding to polarization’s formidable challenges. Some of compliance’s best options are already well known; others will seem surprising. All are deserving of our consideration.
Recommended Citation
Miriam H. Baer,
Reframing Compliance for a Polarized World,
60
Wake Forest L. Rev.
223
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/fs/517