Transnational Governance

Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.

MARIE-LAURE DJELIC is Professor of Management at ESSEC Business School, Paris.

KERSTIN SAHLIN-ANDERSSON is Professor of Management at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Transnational Governance

Institutional Dynamics of Regulation

EDITED BY

MARIE-LAURE DJELIC

AND

KERSTIN SAHLIN-ANDERSSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge Univeristy Press 2006

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First published 2006

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ISBN-13 978-0-521-84503-8 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-84503-3 hardback

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Contents

Figures

Tables

Contributors

MARIE-LAURE DJELIC is Professor at ESSEC Business School, Paris, France where she teaches Organization Theory, Business History and Comparative Capitalism. In 2002–2003, she held the Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Her research interests range from the role of professions and social networks in the transnational diffusion of rules and practices to the historical transformation of national institutions. She is the author of Exporting the American Model (1998), which obtained the 2000 Max Weber Award for the Best Book in Organizational Sociology from the American Sociological Association. She has edited, together with Sigrid Quack, Globalization and Institutions (2003).

KERSTIN SAHLIN-ANDERSSON is Professor of Management at Uppsala University. Her current research interests center around the three following research programs: “Transnational regulations and state transformations,” “Corporate social responsibility and changes in public–private relations,” and “Striving for transparency in health care.” Her most recent edited books are The Expansion of Management Knowledge. Carriers, Flows and Sources (2002, with Lars Engwall) and Beyond Project Management: New Perspectives on the Temporary–Permanent Dilemma (2002, with Anders Söderholm).

GöRAN AHRNE is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and also a researcher at Score (Stockholm Center for Organizational Research). He has published several books on organizations and social theory. His latest book in English is Social Organization (1994). He has also published a chapter, “Soft regulation from an organizational perspective” together with Nils Brunsson (in a volume on soft law, edited by Ulrika Mörth, see below).

JOHN BOLI is Professor of Sociology at Emory University. A native Californian and Stanford graduate, he has published extensively on world culture and global organizations, globalization, education, citizenship, and state power and authority in the world polity. Recent books include World Culture: Origins and Consequences (2005, with Frank Lechner) and Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875 (1999, with George Thomas). His current research includes a project examining the impact of world culture on transnational corporations. Married with three children, he has lived for eight years in Sweden, his wife’s native country.

SEBASTIAN BOTZEM studied political science in Berlin, Germany and Granada, Spain. He graduated in 2001 from the Free University of Berlin and is currently working at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung). His research areas include transnational regulation, economic internationalization and the role of service intermediaries in globalization processes with a particular focus on the internationalization of standards in the field of accounting.

PROFESSOR NILS BRUNSSON holds the City of Stockholm Chair in Management at the Stockholm School of Economics and he is the chairman of Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (Score). He has published some twenty books and numerous articles on issues such as decision-making, hypocrisy, organizational reforms and standardization. He is now leading a research program on rule-setting and rule-following where he is studying forms for global organizing.

GILI S. DRORI is a lecturer in Stanford University’s programs on International Relations and International Policy Studies. Her research interests include the comparative study of science and technology, social progress and rationalization, globalization, governance, and higher education. She is the author of several papers and chapters on science and development, world culture, international organizations, and the role of policy regimes in worldwide governance. These interests are expressed in her recent books: Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization (co-authored with John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez and Evan Schofer, 2003), Global E-litism: Digital Technology, Social Inequality, and Transnationality (2005), and World Society and the Expansion of Formal Organization (co-edited with John W. Meyer and Hokyu Hwang, 2006).

ANITA ENGELS received her doctoral degree in sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She has worked on global environmental change, in the context of both industrialized and developing countries. Her fields of interest are environmental sociology, social studies of science and technology, globalization theory, and economic sociology. From 1999–2001 she was granted a postdoc fellowship at the Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, California. She now works at the Centre for Globalization and Governance at the University of Hamburg.

LARS ENGWALL has been Professor of Business Administration at Uppsala University since 1981 and has also held visiting positions in Belgium, France and the United States. His research has been directed towards structural analyses of industries and organizations as well as the creation and diffusion of management knowledge. He has published a number of books and over one hundred papers in the management area. His most recently edited books are Management Consulting: The Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry (2002, with Matthias Kipping), and The Expansion of Management Knowledge. Carriers, Flows and Sources (2002, with Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson).

TINA HEDMO received her PhD in 2004 from Uppsala University, where she now works as a lecturer in the Department of Business Studies. The title of her dissertation is “Rule-making in the Transnational Space: The Development of European Accreditation of Management Education.” Tina is presently studying the emergence of European regulation in the health care sector and the development of new modes of steering and controlling European higher education. Her research interests include re-regulation processes in these sectors in contemporary society; transnational institutionalization processes and the role and impact of non-governmental organizations in such processes.

BENGT JACOBSSON is Professor of Management at Södertörn University College, Stockholm. His research interests focus on control and decision-making in organizations, transformations in regulation and changing forms of governance. His studies focus on private as well as public organizations; business corporations as well as nation-states. He is currently heading a research program on Europeanization and Changes in the Swedish Government. Among his publications are A World of Standards (together with Nils Brunsson) and Europeanization and Transnational States (together with Per Laegreid and Ove Kai Pedersen) as well a series of books on organizing, control and decision-making in Swedish public administration.

THIBAUT KLEINER, PhD is currently working as an official in the Competition Directorate General of the European Commission. After four years as an economist in the area of merger control, he has recently taken up a new position in charge of state aid policy. He was previously researching and teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has published several articles in the field of comparative institutional analysis, strategy, organization theory and antitrust law in refereed journals and in edited books as well as a number of conference and policy papers.

MARTIN MARCUSSEN is Associate Professor at the International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has written Ideas and Elites: The Social Construction of Economic and Monetary Union (2000) and OECD og idéspillet. Game Over (2002). He is a member of the “Centre for the Study of Democratic Network Governance” (Roskilde University Center) and he is currently working on a research project financed by the Danish Social Science Research Council on the Transnational Central Bank Community.

JASON MCNICHOL received his PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002. His research interests include trends in the global governance of labor and environmental standards as well as the changing roles of firms and non-governmental organizations in regulatory oversight. He has taught at Berkeley, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and other campuses. McNichol currently serves as a program director and officer at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

JOHN W. MEYER is Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at Stanford University. He has, over several decades, developed neoinstitutional analyses of modern organizations and national states, showing the influences of wider cultural models on the development of these “actors.” Currently he works on the rise and impact of world human rights, scientific and organizational models: for instance, in Drori et al., Science in the Modern World Polity (2003).

GLENN MORGAN is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick. He is also a Research Associate of the ESRC Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization based at Warwick as well as Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. He is an Editor of the journal Organization. Recent publications include Changing Capitalisms? Internationalization, Institutional Change and Systems of Economic Organization (2005; edited with Richard Whitley and Eli Moen).

ULRIKA MöRTH is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science at Stockholm University and Senior Researcher and Research Director at Score (Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research). She has published a book on European Cooperation on Armaments (2003) and edited a volume on soft law, Soft Law in Governance and Regulation (2004).

SIGRID QUACK is a senior research fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung). She holds a PhD in sociology from the Free University Berlin and has conducted research in the fields of institutional change, comparative analysis of business systems, gender and organization as well as labor markets and employment. Her current research interests focus on forms of gradual institutional change, the internationalization of professions as well as their role in transnational rule-setting.

FRANCISCO O. RAMIREZ is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology. He currently serves as the Chair of the Social Sciences, Policies, and Educational Practices Area with the Stanford School of Education. His comparative research interests include the globalization of education, the political reconstitution of gender and age, and the institutionalization of science in education and in society. He has published broadly on topics such as patterns of women’s access to higher education, the role of education and science in economic development, and the interplay between education, citizenship and human rights.

LINDA WEDLIN received her PhD in 2004 from Uppsala University where she now holds a position as lecturer in the Department of Business Studies. Her research interests include institutional change and the forming and structuring of cultural and social fields, and the re-regulation of fields and of society. Her main research area is management education and knowledge, with a special focus on issues of regulation, standardization and classification in this field. She recently published Ranking Business Schools (2006), where she analyzes the role of rankings in forming an international field management education.

Acknowledgments

Nothing would have been possible without a cold Swedish winter! The first intuition of this book was born of the close collaboration and stimulating intellectual exchanges between the co-editors in 2002–2003, when Marie-Laure Djelic was Kerstin Hesselgren Professor at Uppsala University. Such close collaboration and regular interaction were made possible by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskaprådet) – the organization that sponsors this professorship. We are both grateful for the opportunity this created for us. This project and our collaboration have proven not only fruitful and intellectually satisfying but also pleasant and at many times exhilarating.

   The Swedish Research Council and the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University also made it possible, financially, to organize a workshop in May 2003 at Uppsala, where all contributors to this volume were present. We would like to thank all participants to this workshop, including Yves Dezalay, Christoph Knill and Dirk Lehmkuhl, for what proved to be extremely rich discussions. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Helena Buhr and her fellow Uppsala PhD students, who helped us with the practical logistics of the workshop.

   From the start, we wanted to construct a tightly-knit and homogeneous volume and not merely a loose collection of chapters. This has meant a series of comments and versions, quite a few back and forth between the contributors and ourselves. We would like to express our gratitude to all contributors for their patience and understanding and for their willingness to go along with us in this direction. Parts of the introduction and some of our own contributions were presented in different workshops and seminars. Participants at the Comparative Sociology Workshop at Stanford, the Scancor Conference on Institutional Change (March 2004) and seminars at the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University have provided us with excellent comments and criticism.

   All along, we were helped by a number of colleagues and scholars who reacted to and commented on parts of the manuscript, shared their own work and engaged with us in discussions, related or apparently unrelated, that in the end proved highly helpful. We would like to thank in particular Erik Berglöf, Barbara Czarniawska, Gili Drori, Rodolphe Durand, Michael Lounsbury, Bengt Jacobsson, John Meyer, Sigrid Quack, Staffan Furusten, Woody Powell, Chiqui Ramirez, Jean-Michel Saussois, Dick Scott, Risto Tainio, Marc Ventresca, Radu Vranceanu and Udo Zander. We would also like to acknowledge the support we received from our own institutions – ESSEC Business School and Uppsala University – during the intense period when we put the book together. All contributors naturally have their own debts, both personal and institutional, and the list here would be too long.

   At Cambridge University Press, we benefited from the support and professionalism of Katy Plowright and Lynn Dunlop. In the last stages of the volume, Stina Andersson has played a pivotal role. We are extremely thankful for all the energy she put in helping us format and prepare the final version of the manuscript. Leif Andersson, Alma and Milena Djelic and Philippe have been helpful in different ways – by being highly reasonable and understanding about the time this book was stealing from them!

Paris and Uppsala July 2005

Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson

Acronyms