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.     

Citizenship agendas,urban governance and social housing in the Netherlands: an assemblage approach

This article combines recent conceptualizations of citizenship beyond the nation state with new perspectives on governance assemblages comprising both state and non-state actors. Focusing on Dutch social housing, this study explores how such governance assemblages produce agendas that attempt to shape citizenship. Employing an assemblage approach, this study first demonstrates how state and non-state actors amalgamate by providing a historical overview of the urban governance of social housing in the Netherlands. Second, taking account of the territory that the assemblage claims, it shows how underprivileged neighbourhoods become the spatial locus of these assemblages. Third, examining what this amalgam produces, the article shows how the assemblage imposes a citizenship agenda on the population of these neighbourhoods, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. Acknowledging that citizenship agendas are produced by a multifaceted amalgam of state and non-state actors, this article emphasizes the need for rigorous academic analysis of such governance assemblages.     

Production goes global,compliance stays local: Private regulation in the global electronics industry

Poor working conditions in global supply chains have led to private initiatives that seek to regulate labor practices in developing countries. But how effective are these regulatory programs? We investigate the effects of transnational private regulation by studying Hewlett‐Packard's (HP) supplier responsibility program. Using analysis of factory audits, interviews with buyer and supplier management, and field research at production facilities across seven countries, we find that national context – not repeated audits, capability building, or supply chain power – is the key predictor of workplace compliance. Quantitative analysis shows that factories in China are markedly less compliant than those in countries with stronger civil society and regulatory institutions. Comparative field research then illustrates how these local institutions complement transnational private regulation. Although these findings imply limits to private regulation in institutionally poor settings, they also highlight opportunities for productive linkages between transnational actors and local state and society.     

The post-migration sexual citizenship of Latino gay men in Canada

The Cuéntame! study interviewed 25 Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men in Toronto. Their migration experiences are traversed by economic rationales, security concerns and the embodied experiences of race, gender, culture and sexuality. Most express narratives of empowered opportunity in distancing themselves from restrictive sexual regimes of their place of origin, but at the same time, many migrants trade a new sense of social acceptance as gay for marginalized statuses defined by diminished social and economic capital. The social participatory rights of citizenship are particularly affected by sexuality and social class. The need and desire to establish social and sexual connections in a new environment often characterized by economic vulnerability shape experiences of social capital and citizenship rights.     

Enacting citizenship in a post-disaster situation: the response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake

This paper examines the domestic response to the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred in March 2011. The demand to (re)build a new ‘community’ in Japan was triggered by the fatal destruction of towns by the earthquake and the tsunami, and the uncertain future of these towns – and of Japan – due to the subsequent prolonged crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Drawing on the political theory of Jean-Luc Nancy, the paper examines what kinds of communities were realised in the aftermath of the disaster. It argues that two distinctively different types of communities emerged. The first type of community was based on the inside/outside logic, whereby Japan was imagined as one unified entity surrounded by a boundary which separated the safe inside from the dangerous outside. The second type of community was based on sharing. Immigrants in Japan identified themselves with the survivors since both of them shared the experience of losing home and the same home (called Japan). In this way, the immigrants challenged the idea of community as one unified entity and realised a new form of community.     

Of ordinariness and citizenship processes

This paper explores the relations between ordinariness and citizenship processes along two different lines. It first aims at empirically exploring certain uses of ordinariness as a political category. While it is often used as a depoliticisation tool, the two case studies analysed here underline on the contrary its politicising potential. In a second, briefer, part, it proposes a discussion of the gains to be obtained in citizenship studies, from using ordinariness as a category of analysis. Approaching citizenship processes ‘from the ordinary’ is a fruitful perspective from which the political dimensions of usually unseen or unheard practices and sites can be grasped. What connects the two discussions presented here is the complex and paradoxical relationship the two categories of ordinariness and politics entertain, both empirically and analytically.     

Pathways to urban citizenship for low-income migrants in São Paulo

Recent waves of migrants are establishing an increasingly visible presence in the urban landscape of São Paulo, both in its centre and its peripheries. Though a city with a rich history of immigration and diversity, the arrival of migrants in recent decades has not been accompanied by specific municipal policies for the migrant population, an absence which affects in particular, low-income migrants. Urban social movements for migration take on the role of attempting to govern migration in the city by providing everyday support to migrants as well as mobilising them as a political group to demand changes on both national and municipal scales; yet these movements have limitations. The paper thus also highlights the agency of migrants in accessing their rights through empowering micro-level social networks and through individual negotiations with legal possibilities. Drawing on examples of institutional, activist and migrant practices in addressing questions of inclusion and exclusion in the city, the paper will trace the multiple and still fragmented ways of articulating rights and developing a sense of urban citizenship as newer waves of migrants join the urban landscape of São Paulo.     

Conceptualizing lived religious citizenship: a case-study of Christian and Muslim women in Norway and the United Kingdom

The concept of ‘religious citizenship’ is increasingly being used by scholars, but there are few attempts at defining it. This article argues that rights-based definitions giving primacy to status and rights are too narrow, and that feminist approaches to citizenship foregrounding identity, belonging and participation, as well as an ethic of care, provide a more comprehensive understanding of how religious women understand and experience their own ‘religious citizenship’. Findings from interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Oslo and Leicester suggest a close relationship between religious women's faith and practice (‘lived religion’) and their ‘lived citizenship’. However, gender inequalities and status differences between majority and minority religions produce challenges to rights-based approaches to religious citizenship.     

Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.     

Silent citizens: reflections on community,habit, and the silent majority in political life

This article identifies two different senses in which the concept of ‘community’ can be seen to underpin the norm of vocal participation in democratic politics. The first is a broadly liberal view of community – traceable to Alexis de Tocqueville – that promotes active, vocal, and autonomous citizens and acts as a buffer between the state and the individual. A second broadly conservative view of community in the writings, for example, of Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot treats community as organic, passive, and largely silent. It valorizes habit and habitual relationships as supporting political life through obedience to the law and respect for authority. While these two traditions stand apart, what is striking about both views of community is the one point about which both agree: citizens' sense of community is in decline within liberal democracies today. Thus silence and silent majorities are problematic to both traditions, albeit for different reasons.