A Blizzard of Paperwork: IRBs and the Hazards of Decentered Accountability in American Regulation

This article presents the case study of a regulatory crackdown on institutional review boards (IRBs) to explore the unintended consequences of a governance style, which I refer to as decentered accountability. I adapt the concept of “decentering” from legal scholarship (Black 2002) to refer to the centrifugal tendencies of American governance, including limited federal bureaucratic capacity, fragmented authority, and a preference for delegation to private actors (Clemens 2006; Mayrl and Quinn 2017; Skocpol and Finegold 1982). In the absence of accountability, decentered regulation may elicit symbolic compliance: the erection of ceremonial structures to protect against disruptive external demands (Edelman et al. 2011; Kalev and Dobbin 2006). In contrast, this study examines how organizations respond when decentered institutions impose the unyielding demands of accountability. I analyze the IRB case to argue that the most immediate hazard of decentered accountability is not symbolic compliance, but rather a disproportionate focus on technical compliance: the bureaucratic tasks through which organizations make themselves accountable. In the long run, I argue that decentered accountability may promote the unsustainable growth of technical compliance costs; and the emergence of commercial industries promising technical compliance with efficiency.