Embeddedness and the Articulation of Capital Interests in Norway

This article focuses on organization of capital interests comparatively across sectors and does so by developing an explanatory framework linking organizational patterns to incentives for individual strategies. The key argument is that variations in the political organization of capital interests across sectors, and the linkages between state and capital interests, reflect different degrees of embeddedness. Underlying the embeddedness hypothesis is the notion that the organization of capital can be seen as an alternative to governance through market processes. Organization may replace market governance either by constituting an alternative to internal self-regulation or by channelling regulatory functions through cooperation with public authorities. A set of hypotheses are developed concerning the relationship between degree of embeddedness on the one hand, and organization of capital interest organization and the interface between state-industry, on the other. The overall picture is that we find support for the crux of our argument, but there are important modifications. As for functional differentiation of capital interests we find, in accordance with OUT hypothesis, that highly embedded capital is associated with organizations that have a broad set of functions. Transient capital, on the other hand, has comparatively less stable ties to production systems as well as other social relations, and is thus more difficult to control organizationally. Concerning vertical integration, our hypotheses is only partially supported Looking at the interface between state and economic organizations in the primary sectors and non-embedded sectors such as finance and insurance, we find the data quite in accordance with our hypotheses. Cases with a medium level of embeddedness do not, however, fit our hypotheses as well as the sectors at the two extreme ends.     

治理结构、运行机制、与政府关系: 非营利组织有效性分析--浙江省义乌市玩具行业协会个案

非营利组织的治理结构、运行机制、与政府关系对于非营利组织的发展特别重要.行业协会是非营利组织的一种形态.通过分析浙江省义乌市玩具行业协会个案,运用制度变迁和合作博弈理论,剖析协会的治理结构、运行机制、与政府关系,探讨非营利组织的有效性.     

Accountability infrastructures: Pragmatic compliance inside organizations

We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setting, program design, and enforcement to the regulated organization. This delegation of governance to the organization itself has catalyzed the creation of accountability infrastructures within organizations, a network of offices, roles, programs, and procedures dedicated to aligning the organization's operations with external standards, codes of conduct, ethical and normative expectations, and regulations. Second, the diverse regulatory models depend, often implicitly, on organizational accountability infrastructures that incorporate the tenets of pragmatist philosophy: inquiry through narration, adaptation to context, and problem-solving through experimentation. Reviewing the empirical literature on organizational compliance, we find ample evidence of inquiry through narration at the organizational coalface. However, we find limited evidence of narrating plurality in the organization and narrating experimentation as problem-solving, as these activities create tensions with internal and external parties who expect singular, stable representations of governance. These tensions reveal an important incongruity between pragmatic governance across organizations and pragmatic governance within organizations. We contribute to the regulatory governance literature by documenting this important shift in the locus of governance to the organizational coalface and by charting a new research agenda. We argue that examinations of regulatory governance should be retraced in three ways. First, attention should shift to the organizational coalface, recognizing and analyzing accountability infrastructures as the central contemporary mechanism of governance. Second, the long-standing focus in regulatory studies on why parties comply should shift to understanding how regulated parties manage themselves to achieve compliance. Third, analyses of compliance should examine the tensions in narrating adaptation and experimentation, and the implications of such tensions for the achievement of prosocial outcomes.     

A Cartography of a Global Civil Society Advocacy Alliance: The Case of the Global Call to Action against Poverty

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of global civil society advocacy networks as major players in global governance. The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is one of the recent phenomena in this arena and epitomizes high-level involvement of a multiplicity of actors in GCAP, with various multilateral governance institutions, as well as states. This article analyses the origins of GCAP, motivations for its formation, evolution, and operations, with specific references to its structures and architecture. It argues that alliances are very different from ‘normal’ forms of organizations because they are made up of diverse forms of organizations, coming together voluntarily to achieve a specific purpose and therefore are by their very nature complex, unstable, and difficult to co-ordinate. The result of such, within GCAP, is an organization that is somewhat amorphous and exhibits both aspects of anti-systemic protest (in Polanyian terms) as well as a pacifying force (part of the hegemonic historic block in Gramcsian terms). I argue that the loose nature of global civil society alliances is a positive contributor to mass mobilization but causes frustrations in decision-making and actions. This, in effect, calls for a more bureaucratized and institutionalized architecture, albeit with a potential to alienate some constituencies. A key lesson from GCAP's evolution, structures, and strategies, I posit, is that it is not possible to push through individual positions without compromising so as to accommodate others.     

Competition and cooperation in artificial intelligence standard setting: Explaining emergent patterns

Efforts to set standards for artificial intelligence (AI) reveal striking patterns: technical experts hailing from geopolitical rivals, such as the United States and China, readily collaborate on technical AI standards within transnational standard-setting organizations, whereas governments are much less willing to collaborate on global ethical AI standards within international organizations. Whether competition or cooperation prevails can be explained by three variables: the actors that make up the membership of the standard-setting organization, the issues on which the organization's standard-setting efforts focus, and the “games” actors play when trying to set standards within a particular type of organization. A preliminary empirical analysis provides support for the contention that actors, issues, and games affect the prospects for cooperation on global AI standards. It matters because shared standards are vital for achieving truly global frameworks for the governance of AI. Such global frameworks, in turn, lower transaction costs and the probability that the world will witness the emergence of AI systems that threaten human rights and fundamental freedoms.     

In the Name of Human Rights: Global Organizations and Participating Citizens

As a contribution to the growing literature on citizenship and advanced liberal governance, this paper focuses on how citizens—especially the poor—are brought into new policy platforms and new social relationships of responsibility, accountability, and participation. In making specific empirical reference to a range of global organizations and their poverty reduction initiatives, the analysis emphasizes the diverse ways in which individuals are governed as certain kinds of “free” persons through particular administrative practices. In this analysis, we underline how some organizations encourage citizens to participate in global practices, markets, and institutions, and train them to act in ways that are aligned with the principles and expectations imposed on them by advanced liberal governmental agendas. We argue that global organizations that are formally or informally linked to other organizations, agencies, and governments around the world, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, view citizens' participation in rights claiming and budgetary design practices as a crucial part of their responsibility to improve their well-being. We also analyse how specific global organizations promote citizens to become consumers of global financial services as a way of solving global poverty. In assessing programmes designed to encourage poor people to participate in global markets and institutions, we contend that these programmes are founded on governing practices that aim to make citizens, non-governmental organizations, and nation-states adhere to advanced liberal principles. We question whether these programmes improve the well-being of poor people. We suggest that future research needs to focus on how global organizations cultivate different discourses of freedom and liberty which serve to govern citizens as responsible consumers and participants.     

论村民委员会作为乡村社会维权性组织的可能与路径

“三农”问题的实质是农民权益问题,作为村民自治组织的村民委员会应成为维护乡村社会权益的组织依托;当前在我国乡村治理的实践中,乡村自治性组织的维权性功能存在着缺位、错位和异化的现象,这是由诸多原因造成的;在社会主义新农村建设中应着力构建以保障农民权益为根本的乡村治理新机制,推进乡村自治组织的社会性复归;通过政治环境的发展、制度机制的重构、文化观念的培育,挖掘和塑造村民自治性组织作为村民群众维权性组织的组织资源和实践能力。     

American standards: definition and differentiation through nonprofit regulation

Nongovernmental organizations are deeply enmeshed in global governance, as promoters and, increasingly, subjects of regulation. Focusing on the proliferation of self-regulatory initiatives, this article asks: Why do NGOs adopt governance initiatives? Do their subsequent regulatory experiences match their expectations? It investigates these questions through the analysis of InterAction, the American international NGO alliance, and its PVO Standards. Based on interviews with NGO leaders, it emphasizes collective meaning over material benefit: American NGOs constitute themselves as American NGOs through standards, with which they underscore their professionalism and market orientation. These gains do not accrue equally, however, with large, central organizations perceived to benefit most from regulation.     

The Institutionalization of Private Governance: How Business and Nonprofit Organizations Agree on Transnational Rules

This article assesses the recent trend of cooperation among antagonistic private actors that results in the creation and implementation of issue-specific transnational norms and rules and the subsequent shift from public to private forms of governance. Many political scientists agree that authority also exists outside of formal political structures. Private actors increasingly begin to make their own rules and standards that acquire authority beyond the international system. This observation is often referred to as private transnational governance as opposed to public or international governance. Although the concept of private governance gains prominence in academic debates, it is not clear how private governance on the global scale is constructed and maintained or what specific or general conditions are necessary for private governance to emerge. Based on the review of common theoretical propositions, this article develops an integrated model along which the necessary conditions for the emergence of private governance can be assessed and understood. As most research has hitherto focused on institutionalized cooperation between business actors (self-regulation), this article takes a closer look at those transnational systems of rule that result out of the enhanced cooperation between profit and nonprofit actors (coregulation).     

Nothing Succeeds Like Access? NGO Strategies Towards Multilateral Institutions

Despite a large literature on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), we still know relatively little about their nature as strategic actors. This article addresses this gap, arguing that a key determinant of NGOs' strategies towards multilateral institutions in particular is their level of formalization. NGOs' choices over both organizational structure and strategy towards multilateral institutions reflect their level of commitment to being a social movement organization. Some NGOs bureaucratize their organizations and seek insider access to (and influence in) multilateral institutions, while others reject formalization as betraying the social movement network ethos and inviting co-option. Drawing on an original database, this article demonstrates that NGOs adopting formal bureaucratic structures are more likely to engage in insider strategies—i.e. lobby and seek accreditation at multilateral institutions—than those maintaining informal coalitional structures, regardless of these NGOs' budgets, age, or ideology. This finding gives us new insight into the divisions within global civil society and the limited prospects for cooperation between two sets of actors central to emerging forms of global governance.     

A Failure to Communicate: 9/11 and the Tragedy of the Informational Commons

ABSTRACT

We investigate how networks among service organizations are integrated through a shared participant type of governance. Shared participant governance is a non-brokered type of network coordination where a network is governed by its members without a separate governance entity. We study the integrative capacity of this type of governance by measuring the effect of participation in a shared participant governance on tie formation in networks among service organizations. We analyze three networks of service organizations in three districts of Antwerp, Belgium. In each of these districts, the networks are governed by welfare meetings, defined as a shared participant type of governance. We use exponential random graph models. The results show that a shared participant type of governance has a positive effect on tie formation. We also find that the positive effect on tie formation is dependent on the active participation of centralized actors in the welfare meetings.     

Civil Society in World Politics: How Accountable are Transnational CSOs?

Transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) are often said to lack accountability. Taking issue with this claim, we report the results of a study on the accountability regimes of 60 transnational CSOs engaging in political advocacy. We scrutinize their transparency, opportunities for internal participation, evaluations and self-regulation, complaint procedures, and their independence from the state and intergovernmental organizations. We find that most transnational CSOs are reasonably transparent and offer participatory opportunities at least for members. They are organizationally independent from states and intergovernmental organizations, but dependencies on public funding are striking in some cases. Independent evaluations of their activities are scarce and codes of conduct, often suggested as an avenue towards better self-regulation of CSOs, do not seem to play a major role in practice. We conclude that the debate over transnational CSO accountability should focus on the most critical issues. In the case of general interest organizations, this seems to be the danger of co-optation through public financing. Special interest organizations, by contrast, are highly independent but have deficits in external transparency, especially regarding their budget.     

G20 institutional transition and global tax governance

The G20 is in transition from a short-term crisis institution to long-term steering institution, adopting a new ‘G20 + established international organization’ governance approach. In this approach, the main role of the G20 is to set the agenda and build political consensus for global economic governance. The established international organization provides the technical support and facilitates proposal implementation, while the precondition for the G20 institutional transition is that the emerging economies need to participate on an equal footing with the advanced economies. The case of global tax governance is among the few success stories of the G20's institutional transition. Within the ‘G20 + OECD’ governance architecture, the G20 builds the political consensus that the profits should be taxed where they are performed, while the OECD proposes the technical Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action Plan. In this way, the G20's political leadership and the OECD's technical advantage complement each other, making a giant leap in global tax governance.     

Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of, policy development generally? The purpose of this article is to reflect on these questions by introducing, and reviewing, a special issue that challenges explicit claims, and implicit methodologies, that treat private and public governance realms as distinct and/or static. We do so by advancing a theoretical and conceptual framework with which to explore how the contributions to this special issue enhance an understanding about governance interactions across a range of empirical, sectoral, and regional domains. We specifically introduce the concept of governance spheres to capture the proliferation of issue domains denoted by highly fluid interactions across public and private governance boundaries.     

Institutionalized social skill and the rise of mediating organizations in urban governance: the case of the Cleveland Housing Network

In this paper we build on an expanding literature that attempts to understand the changing organizational and institutional dimensions of contemporary urban governance. We do so by utilizing the Cleveland Housing Network as a lens through which salient characteristics of contemporary governance become visible. Doing so enables us to highlight the distinctive challenges of the multi-institutional nature of contemporary governance arrangements and “heterarchic” governance in particular. These challenges situate mediating organizations as central components of governance arrangements. Finally, by focusing on the distinctive characteristics of the organization's leaders, we demonstrate that mediating organizations are usefully thought of as institutionalized forms of the “social skill” of institutional entrepreneurs.     

It runs in the family: Meta-regulation and its siblings

Regulators in different countries and domains experiment with regulatory tools that allow organizations to adapt regulation to their individual circumstances, while holding them accountable for their self-regulation systems. Several labels have been coined for this type of regulation, including systems-based regulation, enforced self-regulation, management-based regulation, principles-based regulation, and meta-regulation. In this article, these forms of regulatory governance are classified as belonging to one family of “process-oriented regulation.” Based on a review of diverse empirical and theoretical research, it is suggested that the family of process-oriented regulation tends to have a positive, albeit varied, impact on organizations' performance, and the factors that shape this inconsistent effect are analyzed. Building on aspects of Parker's normative construct of “meta-regulation,” the article explores the extent to which her innovative notion of a learning-oriented approach to regulation might overcome some of the weaknesses of prevalent process-oriented approaches. It is proposed that under conditions of regulatory uncertainty or entrenched and prevalent non-compliance or both, meta-regulation is likely to have many advantages over other forms of process-oriented regulation. Yet realizing these advantages requires a rare combination of high regulatory capacity, a stable regulatory agenda, and a supportive political environment.     

企业改革路在何方:基于“从本质到现象”分析框架的探索

对企业组织及其发展走势的认知应该基于从本质到现象的研究路线,而不能局限于事物的表象并为不同时空下的不同形态所遮蔽。由此就有:首先,与协作系统这一本质相对应,利益相关者社会观就是对企业的合理认知;其次,在现实世界中,信息和力量的不对称却导致了企业组织的异化发展,由此就产生了当前盛行的股东价值观;最后,随着社会发展带来信息机制的完善和力量分布的分散,异化了的企业组织又会呈现出回归协作系统这一本质的基本趋势。同时,对企业的认知也与社会文化和心理意识有关,因而不同社会中的企业组织呈现出的异化程度也不一样。事实上,无论是在产权安排还是治理机制上,日本等东方社会的企业组织都与流行的理论存在很大差异,相应地,我国企业组织及制度的建设也必须与儒家社会的文化心理相适应。     

Neo-liberalism and polycontextuality: banking crisis and re-regulation in Sweden

This article gives an account of the interpretative conflicts and re-regulative initiatives that followed the Swedish banking crisis in the 1990s. The analysis is based on systems theory and theories of governance conceptualizing steering and self-regulation. It shows the polycontextuality of the conflicts over the crisis, and how the re-regulation articulated central aspects of neo-liberal government, as conceptualized in terms of governance. The conclusion discusses two paradoxes. The first is that the enforced self-regulation of the re-regulative process 'frees' market actors by embedding them in new webs of governance. The second paradox is that every solution to a problematic event of this kind is at the same time seen as a new problem when observed with distinctions other than the one reduced by the solution.     

‘Responsibilty’ as a strategy of governance: regulating people living with AIDS and lesbians and gay men in Ontario

This paper investigates responsibility/irresponsibility as an important regulatory strategy, in two instinct but interrelated social sites – people living with AIDS and HIV, and lesbians and gay men, especially within the Canadian province of Ontario. This responsibility/irresponsibility technique of governance is developing in response to the struggles of people with AIDS and community-based AIDS groups and lesbians and gay men and the alternative strategies of regulation articulated through these struggles. Practices of ‘resistance’ and activism alter the grounds of hegemonic regulation/governance and point towards new techniques of governance. I show how responsibilizing and normalizing strategies in the context of social struggles over AIDS and sexual regulation allows for those constructed as ‘responsible’ to be managed through forms of self-regulation and professional forms of goverance of their live. For those who continue to be constructed as ‘irresponsible’ forms of criminal law, policing and public health governance are called into action.     

Correlates of rigorous and credible transnational governance: A cross‐sectoral analysis of best practice compliance in eco‐labeling

The number of eco‐labeling schemes is rising dramatically, yet the rigor and credibility of such schemes remains uneven. Whereas some eco‐labeling organizations (ELOs) comply with best practice guidelines designed to increase the credibility of their standards through attention to good operating principles, such as transparency and impartiality, others do not. Within this article, I attempt to explain this variation through multivariate regression analysis of an original cross‐sectoral dataset of transnational ELO policies and practices. I find compelling evidence to suggest that ELOs with environmental non‐governmental organization (ENGO) partners, nonprofit structures, or broad transnational reach are most likely to comply with best practices. I also find that private ELOs are more likely to disregard best practices than public ones. Conversely, I find little evidence that levels of industry funding or sector‐specific competition dynamics affect best practice compliance. This study contributes new data, a new method of comparison, and new findings to the growing literature on transnational governance.