The application of legislative decree no.231/2001 through organizational models: rhetoric or real effectiveness?

The purpose of this paper is to describe the quality of the Italian government strategy for preventing and combating corruption through the application of the Legislative Decree 231 of 2001 and its impact on organizational procedures.  We carried out an empirical research on the application of Legislative Decree 231 based on an empirical analysis of more than 500 Italian VET providers. The results depict a controversial situation. A small part of the sample seems to comply with the law, the remaining organizations just comply with the issues of mere form, they “simply” incorporate norms from their institutional environments and thus gain legitimacy, resources and stability. In this way they “institutionalise” compliance with Decree 231. And this, in turn, shows that this illusion of compliance does not coincide with ethics. It is clear that there is a great risk of creating a merely formal paper-based compliance system, which has no real impact on organisational behaviour, despite the fact that compliance is compulsory and anticipated by a law.

The paper provides a starting point, which enables to reflect on the intertwined relationship between ethics and compliance, and to outline the pros and cons of the current applications made by the Italian VET providers.