Globalisation has significantly changed the context of governance and regulation at both a national and international level. Such change has driven extensive debate on how to achieve more efficient regulation and better governance within new circumstances. A key concern at the level of the workplace, however, is how compliance with the standards required by regulations – whatever their form – is achieved in practice, and it is this that we are mainly concerned with here. In this article, we make use of a case study undertaken in the shipping industry in the course of which we carefully discussed the drivers of compliance with seafarers and with ship managers, charterers and related personnel. We suggest that a consideration of the perspective of workers and managers is vital in understanding drivers of compliance and therefore to informing debates on effective regulation.