King's Business

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time, they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets,’ this paper examines this tension and studies how different social movement and industry-driven standards organizations compete as well as collaborate over governance in transnational arenas. Based on an in-depth case study of sustainability standards in the global coffee industry, we find that the ongoing co-existence of multiple standards is being promoted by the interplay between two countervailing mechanisms: convergence and differentiation. In conjunction, these mechanisms are enabling the emergence and persistence of a market for standards through what we describe as meta-standardization of sustainable practices. Meta-standardization leads to convergence at the ‘rules of the game’ level, but allows also differentiation at the attributes level, which is enabling parties to create and maintain their own standards. Our study helps to advance the understanding of transnational governance by explaining the dynamics of competing and collaborating non-state actors in constituting a standards market.

Abstract Social and environmental standards have become significant in the private regulation of several industries. But unlike governmental regulation, multiple standards co-exist in parallel. In this paper we explore the antecedents and consequences of the multiplication of standards, as well as potential scenarios and their conditions for the evolution of competitive standards markets.

The global coffee sector has seen a transformation towards more ‘sustainable’ forms of production, and, simultaneously, the continued dominance of mainstream coffee firms and practices. We examine this paradox by conceptualizing the underlying process of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a series of long-term, multi-dimensional interactions between civil society and corporate actors, drawing from the neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony and passive revolution. A longitudinal study of the evolution of coffee sustainability standards suggests that PCSR can be understood as a process of challenging and defending value regimes, within which viable configurations of economic models, normative-cultural values, and governance structures are aligned and stabilized. Specifically, we show how dynamics of moves and accommodations between challengers and corporate actors shape the practice and meaning of ‘sustainable’ coffee. The results contribute to understanding the political dynamics of CSR as a dialectic process of ‘revolution/restoration’, or passive revolution, whereby value regimes assimilate and adapt to potentially disruptive challenges, transforming sustainability practices and discourse.

W hereas the deliberative democracy approach to ethics seeks to bridge universalist reason and contextual judgment to explain the emergence of intersubjective agreements, it remains unclear how these two are reconciled in practice. We argue that a sensemaking approach is useful for examining how ethical truces emerge in equivocal situations. To understand how actors navigate through ethical complexity, we conducted an ethnographic inquiry into the multistakeholder practices of setting Fairtrade Minimum Prices. We offer three contributions. First, we develop a process model of ethics as sensemaking that explains how actors come to collectively agree on what is ethical in complex situations, even if no complete consensus arises. Second, our findings suggest that moral intuition and affect also motivate ethical judgment alongside moral reasoning. Third, an ethical sensemaking perspective explains some of the pitfalls actors confront in coping with ethical complexities in practice and how they attend to the challenges arising from stark inequalities in extreme contexts.

Sustainability transitions have been studied as complex multi-level processes, but we still know relatively little about how they can be effectively governed, especially in transnational domains. Governance of transitions is often constrained by the equivocality of sustainability goals, the idiosyncrasy of niche experiments and the multiplicity of governance actors and interests. We study the role of transnational standard-setters in mitigating these challenges and governing sustainability transitions within a transnational sector. Our case is the global coffee sector where ‘sustainability standards’ are increasingly being adopted. We find that the emergence of a ‘modular governance architecture’ has helped diverse and heterogeneous actors turn sustainability from an ambiguous concept into a concrete set of semi-independent practices, while mitigating governance complexity. We show how standard-setters create governance modules through local niche experimentation, negotiate and legitimate their content with peers across local contexts, and re-integrate them into an emerging architecture. Our findings shed light on the role of modular processes in managing sustainability transitions and transnational governance, and the dynamics of meaning-making in this process.

Research has shown that management practices are adapted and 'made to fit' the specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between allowing local adaptation of a management practice and retaining control over the practice? By studying the adaptation of a specialized quality management practice -ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence) -in a multinational corporation in the aerospace industry, we examine how the organization manages the adaptation process at the corporate and subsidiary levels. We identified three strategies through which an organization balances the tension between standardization and variation -preserving the 'core' practice while allowing local adaptation at the subsidiary level: creating and certifying progressive achievement levels; setting discretionary and mandatory adaptation parameters; and differentially adapting to context-specific and systemic misfits. While previous studies have shown how and why practices vary as they diffuse, we show how practices may diffuse because they are engineered to vary for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities.

ABSTRACT We examine the process through which responsibility for ‘wicked problems’ is socially constructed and attributed to particular actors. Private companies have taken on increasing responsibilities for what were previously considered public issues. However, what counts as public or private responsibilities especially in the context of wicked problems remains highly contested. Drawing on a case study of conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this paper examines how private responsibility for human rights abuses was established through a process involving NGOs, state and industry. We contribute by 1) showing how the definition of an issue and its root cause shapes responsibility attribution, 2) identifying mechanisms through which responsibility frames are made binding and resilient and 3) showing how private and public responsibilities for an issue may emerge and shift over time and involve a broad spectrum of actors in complementary and conflicting roles.

We study the influence of a pervasive Western organizational mentality – clock-time orientation – in market-based models for human development. While a linear, clock-time orientation optimized for markets is meant to enhance efficiency, coordination and control, it may be unsuitable for managing emergent, complex and indeterminate processes such as development. To examine how the tension between market and development temporalities plays out at the organizational level, we draw on an ethnography of Fairtrade International, an organization connecting markets in the North with low income community development in the South. We examine intra-organizational contestation over the use of different temporal structures in the organization’s development model. We explain how contestation, temporal reflexivity and interpretive shifts led to the reconstitution of Fairtrade’s model to bridge competing temporal structures – moving picture and snapshot, temporal asymmetry and symmetry, and long an...