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Standards often remain unseen, yet they play a fundamental part in the organisation of contemporary capitalism and society at large. What form of power do they epitomise? Why have they become so prominent? Are they set to be as important for the globalisation of services as for manufactured goods? Graz draws on international political economy and cognate fields to present strong theoretical arguments, compelling research and surprising evidence on the role of standards in the global expansion of services, with in-depth studies of their institutional environment and cases including the insurance industry and business process outsourcing in India. The power of standards resembles a form of transnational hybrid authority, in which ambiguity should be seen as a generic attribute, defining not only the status of public and private actors involved in standardisation and regulation, but also the scope of issues concerned and the space in which such authority is recognised when complying to standards. This book is also available as Open Access.

Standards often remain unseen, yet they play a fundamental part in the organisation of contemporary capitalism and society at large. What form of power do they epitomise? Why have they become so prominent? Are they set to be as important for the globalisation of services as for manufactured goods? Graz draws on international political economy and cognate fields to present strong theoretical arguments, compelling research and surprising evidence on the role of standards in the global expansion of services, with in-depth studies of their institutional environment and cases including the insurance industry and business process outsourcing in India. The power of standards resembles a form of transnational hybrid authority, in which ambiguity should be seen as a generic attribute, defining not only the status of public and private actors involved in standardisation and regulation, but also the scope of issues concerned and the space in which such authority is recognised when complying to standards.

With a focus on the concept of grounding, this special section argues that the politics of transnational private governance should be understood in the double meaning of, on the one hand, its local implementation and, on the other hand, practices of political contestation and translation. The concept of grounding thus allows for a localized focus on practices used by actors in transnational private governance. By doing so, we hope to make three contributions to the current debate. The first is to never lose sight that governance is first and foremost about politics; the second is to provide a conceptual framework making more explicit the intrinsic limits of transnational private governance efforts; the third is about the form of power exercised by transnational private regulatory initiatives in global production networks. This introduction provides historiographical and conceptual background to this special section, which brings in scholars across social sciences, including political science, sociology, law and philosophy. It introduces the contributions from research communities that usually remain separate in their analysis of standards used in global production networks in the domain of labour, environment, and human rights.

The authority gained by technical standards presumably set in favor of powerful global corporations is one of the contentious issues on which populist movements have capitalised worldwide to engrain a new wave of globalization backlash. This chapter explores to what extent global corporations are able to set standards in their own interests and discusses how such standards exercise a form of alternative authority. In contrast to conventional accounts highlighting welfare costs and benefits of standardization, it forges a global political economy perspective that puts emphasis on the comprehensive foundation of power relations involved in the regulatory authority of standards. It argues that standards reflect a form of hybrid governance over which global corporations have much hold and that increasingly competes with previous rules governing markets, and more generally the social foundations of state power. Despite the lack of fully reliable and systematic data on corporate influence in standard-setting processes, the chapter provides, however, some evidence of the ability of corporate representatives to organize themselves and defend their interests on a truly global level.

Les approches en termes de gouvernance ne donnent pas une explication cohérente du pouvoir consacré par l'émergence d'acteurs non étatiques sur la scène mondiale. Or, le terme d'hybride peut contribuer de façon spécifique au débat sur la mondialisation du capitalisme. Dans la mythologie, les créatures hybrides se caractérisent par une ambiguïté ontologique et une ambivalence émotionnelle. En associant ces enseignements avec les approches hétérodoxes en économie politique internationale, on peut conceptualiser les nouvelles formes de la régulation du capitalisme à partir de trois niveaux de transfert d'autorité, mettant ainsi en évidence la forte corrélation entre ambiguïté des transferts formels et informels de l'autorité et ambivalence du pouvoir incarné par ce type de gouvernance, célébré par les uns, contesté par les autres.

La normalisation internationale désigne ici les spécifications techniques volontaires intervenant dans la production et les échanges internationaux. L'article développe un cadre théorique qui prolonge l'hypothèse de l'irruption de formes hybrides d'autorité non étatique à l'échelle mondiale. À partir du cas du projet de norme iso de système de gestion de la responsabilité sociale des entreprises, il montre que la normalisation internationale est sujette à un antagonisme profond. Celui-ci oppose les partisans d'une socialisation des normes internationales (transfert de la compétence universelle de la loi dans le cadre formel de la normalisation internationale) à ceux d'une mondialisation des normes marchandes (reconnaissance universelle de normes sectorielles minimales, définies principalement par le marché).