Regulatory leadership: conducting mundane work to ‘tailor’ rules

Increasingly, rules and regulations are viewed as barriers to good care. In this chapter, we zoom in on the daily work that regulatory leaders perform to ‘tailor’ rules to ensure good care in an increasingly layered and networked system. We define regulatory leaders as actors that are positioned vertically ‘in-between’ the work floor and higher management of public (care) organizations and/or horizontally ‘in-between’ inter-organizational networks of different public service providers. Due to these middle positions, they have the unique ability to co-shape and tailor policy rules and regulations in interaction with multiple stakeholders. Based on an ethnographic study of regulatory leaders in the Dutch social care domain, we outline three types of work that are crucial for regulatory leadership: platforming work (creating platforms that recouple stakeholders from multiple levels, departments and organizations in order to discuss and reflect on non-functional rules), reframing work (reconceptualizing the problem of non-fitting or conflicting rules in a different way) and contexting work (creating organizational and financial structures that support good care). In conclusion, we argue that regulatory leadership can be further fostered by creating comfort zones in which stakeholders feel secure enough to experiment with rules.