Multinationals as global institution: Power,authority and relative autonomy

This article aims to inform the long‐standing and unresolved debate between voluntary corporate social responsibility and initiatives to impose binding legal obligations on multinational enterprises. The two approaches share a common feature: neither can fully specify its own scope conditions, that is, how much of the people and planet agenda either can expect to deliver. The reason they share this feature is also the same: neither is based on a foundational political analysis of the multinational enterprise in the context of global governance. Such an analysis is essential for providing background to and perspective on what either approach can hope to achieve, and how. This article begins to bridge the gap by illustrating aspects of the political power, authority, and relative autonomy of the contemporary multinational enterprise. The conclusion spells out some implications for the debate itself, and for further research.     

Private regulatory capture via harmonization: An analysis of global retailer regulatory intermediaries

Studies using the Regulatory–Intermediary–Target (RIT) framework have examined a variety of forms of regulatory capture, including how targets capture intermediaries (T?I) and how intermediaries capture regulators (I?R). Little attention has been paid to why and how regulators themselves might engage in capture. Yet such a scenario is likely in transnational governance settings characterized by regulatory competition and conflict, as well as power differentials between different types of private regulators (non‐governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and business associations). This paper elucidates why and how a private regulator might capture another private regulator via a regulatory intermediary: R1?I?R2. Drawing on interview and archival data, I examine three industry‐driven regulatory intermediaries created to harmonize private labor codes of conduct and ethical audit processes. These are founded and governed by a small group of retail trade associations and global retailers who also fulfill the role of private regulators (R1). My analysis reveals that the creation of these intermediaries is driven by global retailers’ reliance on standardization, low transaction costs, and regulatory harmonization across all aspects of their operations. It further reveals how the harmonization platforms are designed to leverage global retailers’ market power and evolve from regulatory intermediaries into de facto regulators that supplant existing private regulators (R2), and thereby capture transnational governance of consumer product supply chains. The article concludes by discussing contributions, implications, and avenues for future research.     

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.     

全球化时代企业劳动者权益保护面临的挑战和对策

经济全球化、全球市场的开放和融合使全球范围的竞争加剧。为了降低生产成本,提高竞争力,许多国家都把压低本国劳动力成本作为首选的方式。这就使政府对劳动关系规制放松,企业拥有更多的工作场所的支配权,采取了更为灵活的雇佣方式,雇佣更多非全日制员工、短期员工、租赁员工等。而这些非“正式”员工的劳动保障和待遇往往都很低,一些基本的劳动权益很难保障。本文分析了全球化对劳动者权益的影响,指出劳动者权益缺失产生的严重后果,最后提出相应的解决对策,即政府应加强对劳动者权益保护,加强企业社会责任,强化工会职能,三管齐下维护劳动者权益。     

Codes in context: How states,markets, and civil society shape adherence to global labor standards

Transnational business regulation is increasingly implemented through private voluntary programs – such as certification regimes and codes of conduct – that diffuse global standards. However, little is known about the conditions under which companies adhere to these standards. We conduct one of the first large‐scale comparative studies to determine which international, domestic, civil society, and market institutions promote supply chain factories' adherence to the global labor standards embodied in codes of conduct imposed by multinational buyers. We find that suppliers are more likely to adhere when they are embedded in states that participate actively in the International Labour Organization treaty regime and that have stringent domestic labor law and high levels of press freedom. We further demonstrate that suppliers perform better when they serve buyers located in countries where consumers are wealthy and socially conscious. These findings suggest the importance of overlapping state, civil society, and market governance regimes to meaningful transnational regulation.     

Mainstreamed voluntary sustainability standards and their effectiveness: Evidence from the Honduran coffee sector

Voluntary Sustainability Standards have become a popular private governance framework for more sustainable agri-food value chains. Yet, amid increasing concerns over the decoupling of standards and practices, it is still unclear to what extent agricultural standard requirements are implemented on the ground, and what may account for such differential implementation. This study employs a novel dataset of 659 Honduran coffee producers to examine this puzzle, focusing on the most widely used standards in the coffee sector (Common Code for the Coffee Community, Fairtrade, Fairtrade/organic, UTZ Certified, and Rainforest Alliance). It first presents results on implementation and behavioral change, based on matched groups of certified and non-certified farmers, for eight representative social and environmental sustainability practices. Analyzing determinants of implementation success, it finds that the stringency of rules – if they are known by farmers – and the level of farm-gate prices are significantly correlated with farmers’ performance and lower levels of decoupling across a majority of indicators. These results speak to the importance of supporting small-scale actors’ awareness of and financial capacity to comply with proposed sustainability rules.     

Assessing the institutionalization of private sustainability governance in a changing coffee sector

The potential of transnational private governance initiatives to constitute effective alternatives to state‐led regulation of global value chains rests on their ability to scale up and become institutionalized in a given sector. This study examines whether such institutionalization has occurred in the coffee sector, the commodity with the most widespread adoption of certified products and over 30 years’ experience of private governance, and tests hypotheses on facilitating and inhibiting conditions. It finds that while norm generation around responsible supply chain management and the organizational institutionalization of standard‐setting bodies is well advanced, the practice of internalizing social and environmental externalities through the routinized production and purchase of higher priced certified goods continues to be questioned by industry actors. Indeed, conditions that favored normative and organizational institutionalization, such as high levels of industry concentration, product differentiation, and deliberative interaction, are shown to represent barriers to the practice‐oriented institutionalization of market‐driven regulatory governance.     

Can non‐state global governance be legitimate? An analytical framework

In the absence of effective national and intergovernmental regulation to ameliorate global environmental and social problems, “private” alternatives have proliferated, including self‐regulation, corporate social responsibility, and public–private partnerships. Of the alternatives, “non‐state market driven” (NSMD) governance systems deserve greater attention because they offer the strongest regulation and potential to socially embed global markets. NSMD systems encourage compliance by recognizing and tracking, along the market’s supply chain, responsibly produced goods and services. They aim to establish “political legitimacy” whereby firms, social actors, and stakeholders are united into a community that accepts “shared rule as appropriate and justified.” Drawing inductively on evidence from a range of NSMD systems, and deductively on theories of institutions and learning, we develop an analytical framework and a preliminary set of causal propositions to explicate whether and how political legitimacy might be achieved. The framework corrects the existing literature’s inattention to the conditioning effects of global social structure, and its tendency to treat actor evaluations of NSMD systems as static and strategic. It identifies a three‐phase process through which NSMD systems might gain political legitimacy. It posits that a “logic of consequences” alone cannot explain actor evaluations: the explanation requires greater reference to a “logic of appropriateness” as systems progress through the phases. The framework aims to guide future empirical work to assess the potential of NSMD systems to socially embed global markets.     

The European regulation of corporate social responsibility: The role of beneficiaries' intermediaries

Intended beneficiaries have an undeniable relevance to regulation. However, current research has focused mainly on the two‐party relationship between rulemaking and rule‐taking. We attempt to fill this gap by exploring the formal and informal roles that beneficiaries’ intermediaries played in co‐creating European Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rules and associated practices between 2000 and 2017. By linking recent conceptualizations of regulatory intermediaries with the literature on critical political CSR, we offer a more dynamic and contextualized understanding of the roles of beneficiaries’ intermediaries. Specifically, we identify six micro‐dynamics through which they influenced the regulatory process. Notably, our findings highlight how the convergence of interests between three groups of beneficiaries’ intermediaries – the Non‐governmental organization–Investor–Union nexus – had a key role in reshaping CSR rules. We conclude that, in the European context, stronger and better‐coordinated beneficiaries’ intermediaries are crucial in order to achieve more effective corporate conduct regulation.     

Forest certification as a global environmental governance tool: What is the macro-effectiveness of the Forest Stewardship Council?

Sustainable forest management is a key challenge for local and global governance. The Forest Stewardship Council has emerged as one of the solutions to global forest deterioration and is generally regarded as the prime example of certification as a global governance tool. This article examines the macro-effectiveness of certification on halting deforestation and examines the relationship between certification and governance institutions. The article finds that the macro-effectiveness of certification on halting deforestation is still limited due to the “stuck at the bottom” problem of developing countries, which are kept out of the certification process, and the market-driven nature of certification initiatives. The article does not find a relationship between certification and governance institutions at the macro level. It does find, however, significant variation in certification uptake between countries, pointing to the potential of this policy tool. The implications of the results are discussed.     

Governing health and safety at lower tiers of the computer industry global value chain

Global brands remain under increasing pressure to ensure labor standards and codes of conduct are met by their suppliers. Little is known about how this is addressed by lower tier suppliers. We investigate whether, and how, occupational health and safety standards permeate down the computer industry value chain. We compare first and second tier suppliers' engagement with a private voluntary industry code, the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct, and the publicly regulated European Union Directive on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances. We find the industry code absent at the lower tier, yet second tier suppliers do implement the European Union Directive. This is achieved without support from public agencies or global value chain linkages. Our findings question the emphasis placed on chain governance in studies of labor compliance in global value chains, and suggest that alternative and complementary approaches may be required for effective labor compliance throughout the value chain.     

Public orchestration,social networks,and transnational environmental governance: Lessons from the aviation industry

This article contributes to current debates on the potential and limitations of transnational environmental governance, addressing in particular the issue of how private and public regulation compete and/or reinforce each other – and with what results. One of the most influential approaches to emerge in recent years has been that of “orchestration.” But while recent discussions have focused on a narrow interpretation of orchestration as intermediation, we argue that there is analytical traction in studying orchestration as a combination of directive and facilitative tools. We also argue that a social network analytical perspective on orchestration can improve our understanding of how governments and international organizations can shape transnational environmental governance. Through a case study of aviation, we provide two contributions to these debates: first, we propose four analytical factors that facilitate the possible emergence of orchestration (issue visibility, interest alignment, issue scope, and regulatory fragmentation and uncertainty); and second, we argue that orchestrators are more likely to succeed when they employ two strategies: (i) they use a combination of directive and facilitative instruments, including the provision of feasible incentives for industry actors to change their behavior, backed up by regulation or a credible regulatory threat; and (ii) they are robustly embedded in, and involved in the formation of, the relevant transnational networks of actors and institutions that provide the infrastructure of governance. © 2017 JohnWiley & Sons Australia, Ltd     

Governing the ungovernable: The challenge of a global disaggregation of authority

The processes of globalization have led to a proliferation of spheres of authority and significant challenges for global governance. In this paper is discussed the concept of spheres of authority, the factors that encourage their proliferation, and the prospects for global governance in a world of disaggregated authority. The proliferation of spheres of authority does not mean that global governance is impossible, but that it will not result from a global government. Instead, governance will emerge from the interaction of overlapping spheres of authority; regulation will be achieved not through centralized authority but through the spread of norms, informal rules, and regimes.     

Private regulation,public policy,and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.     

Regulatory capabilities: A normative framework for assessing the distributional effects of regulation

This paper develops the normative concept of “regulatory capabilities.” It asserts that nobody – individuals, groups, or entities – should be subjected to a regulatory regime without some freedom to determine its nature. Self‐determination in this context means the ability to accept or reject a regulatory regime imposed by others or to develop viable alternative approaches. We use the term “regulatory capabilities” to capture the importance of enabling conditions for regulatory self‐determination. This is particularly important in the transnational context where private, hybrid public–private, and public actors compete for influence, shape domestic regulation, and, in doing so, limit the scope for democratic self‐governance. In short, this paper seeks to contribute to the general debate on the normative foundations of and the requisite conditions for transnational regulation and governance.     

The Transformation of organic regulation: The ambiguous effects of publicization

The regulatory regime for organic products is different from other non‐state‐market driven (NSMD) regimes because it is the only one that evolved from a purely private into a regime where the establishment of minimum standards has become the monopoly of public powers. This article is the first to study the effects of the process of publicization, a term coined to characterize the transformation of private into public standards. The central hypothesis studied is that the process of publicization has empowerment and containment effects at the same time. To test the hypothesis the article analyses the effects of publicization on regulatory capabilities of private regulators as well as on the quality of the standards. The effects of publicization are further explored by comparing the legal and institutional architecture that shapes the coexistence of private and public regimes in the EU and the US, showing important differences between the two systems. The article offers a new perspective to look at the dynamic interaction between private and public regulation and its findings are of general relevance for the debate on the desirability of governmental intervention on private regulatory schemes.     

Exploring the formal and informal roles of regulatory intermediaries in transnational multistakeholder regulation

Research on regulation and regulatory processes has traditionally focused on two prominent roles: rulemaking and rule‐taking. Recently, the mediating role of third party actors, regulatory intermediaries, has started to be explored – notably in a dedicated special issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The present special issue extends this line of research by elaborating the distinction between formal and informal modes of regulatory intermediation, in the specific context of transnational multistakeholder regulation. In this introduction, we identify two key dimensions of intermediation (in)formalism: officialization and formalization. This allows us to develop a typology of intermediation in multistakeholder regulatory processes: formal, interpretive, alternative, and emergent. Leveraging examples from the papers in this special issue, we discuss how these four types of intermediation coexist and evolve over time. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of our typology for regulatory processes and outcomes.     

The government of self-regulation: on the comparative dynamics of corporate social responsibility

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and government. CSR is often viewed as self-regulation, devoid of government. We attribute the scholarly neglect of the variety of CSR-government relations to the inadequate attention paid to the important differences in the way in which CSR has ‘travelled’ (or diffused), and has been mediated by the national governance systems, and the insufficient emphasis given to the role of the government (or government agency) in the CSR domain. We go on to identify a number of different types of CSR-government configurations, and by following empirically the CSR development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia in a comparative historical perspective, we derive a set of propositions on the changing dynamics of CSR-government configurations. In particular, we highlight the varied role that the governments can play in order to promote CSR in the context of the wider national governance systems.     

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.