Organizational arrangements for targeted transparency. Legal or communicative enactment of disclosure requirements

Abstract

Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument to increase compliance. While the use of disclosed information by consumers has been studied, little is known about the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational arrangement for the production of client communication products? Scholars suggest that the translation of this trade-off into organizational practices is influenced by the perception of the regulatory environment. We present an empirical study of 24 pension funds in the Netherlands to investigate this issue. Our findings falsify the expected relations between perceptions of the environment and organizational arrangements for client communication practices. Instead, this study highlights that a hybrid organizational arrangement for communicating with clients is the modus operandi for most organizations as it is an attractive way of integrating both legal and communicative expertise. Further research is needed to find out why organizations do or don’t choose this option.