Private Regulation and Industrial Organisation: The Network Approach (original) (raw)
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Private Regulation, Supply Chain and Contractual Networks: The Case of Food Safety
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010
The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), directed by Stefano Bartolini since September 2006, is home to a large post-doctoral programme. Created in 1992, it aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society. The Centre hosts major research programmes and projects, and a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration and the expanding membership of the European Union.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2013
Recent research on regulation and governance suggests that a mixture of public and private interventions is necessary to improve working conditions and environmental standards within global supply chains. Yet less attention has been directed to how these different forms of regulation interact in practice. The form of these interactions is investigated through a contextualized comparison of suppliers producing for Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading global electronics firms. Using a unique dataset describing Hewlett-Packard's supplier audits over time, coupled with qualitative fieldwork at a matched pair of suppliers in Mexico and the Czech Republic, this study shows how private and public regulation can interact in different ways-sometimes as complements; other times as substitutes-depending upon both the national contexts and the specific issues being addressed. Results from our analysis show that private interventions do not exist within a vacuum, but rather these efforts to enforce labour and environmental standards are affected by state and non-governmental actors.
2015
The past decades have witnessed the emergence and p roliferation of private standards. While there has not yet been an internationally recognize d definition, private standards generally refer to any requirements that are established by non-gov ernmental entities including wholesale or retail stores, national producer associations, civi l society groups or combinations of them . They contain rules mainly related to food safety, enviro nmental protection, animal welfare, fair trade, labour conditions, human rights protection and othe rs. Sectors addressed by private standards are agriculture, forestry, aquaculture, apparel, fair t rade, but other sectors are experiencing the emergence of such standards as well. While private standards may provide a stimulus to improved production practices and performance in ex porting countries, and potentially provide a competitive advantage to complying producers, the p roliferation and increased influence of private standards has become an increa...
2010
The aim of this paper is to address and analyze the use of different self-regulation systems in the global value chains by asking why companies voluntarily co-operate by self-regulating, even though they compete, also with each other, in the market. Secondly, it is argued that the lawmaker should take private-regulation more seriously as a regulatory strategy because of its benefits and feasibility in the dynamic, global business environment. First, the use of self-regulation in value chain is analysed based on empirical evidence as presented in international and Finnish research papers. Secondly, the results are reflected on with more theoretical arguments.
Nesting, overlap and parallelism: Governance schemes for international production standards
Princeton Nesting Conference, 2006
Some of our current research concerns the development of governance arrangements for international production such as labor, environmental or human rights standards. What we observe is a wide variety of different "regulatory" schemes, ranging from somewhat traditional governance by states or through international organizations to a plethora of innovative arrangements involving private actors --including NGOs, industry groups and individual firms themselves. 1 We arrange these different schemes on the Governance Triangle, which is a three-dimensional simplex representing the respective shares of business, NGOs and states in standards governance. 2 Our puzzle is to explain the diversity of these arrangements --which we do in terms of the structures of different problems and of international business transactions, the incentives of the actors, and the competencies of different actors relative to tasks involved in setting and implementing production standards. We are also interested in whether and when private schemes can be effective where state-based schemes fail, or whether the two can reinforce each other's effectiveness. The interactions among this multiplicity and diversity of schemes are highly relevant to the nesting project.
Chapter 12. Private Import Safety Regulation and Transnational New Governance
Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, 2010
The world is awash in complex systems of private regulation, many of which are highly innovative and dynamic. This chapter discusses the current and potential role of private regulatory systems in ensuring import safety. Using recent developments in food safety regulation as a primary example, it argues that private regulatory institutions can provide valuable control and learning capacities for an effective import safety regulatory system. However, signifi cant institutional developments are needed to adequately take into account the full range of interests that must be accommodated in global production systems. Safety regulation is currently spread out among a large number of public and private organizations, often with overlapping or competing roles, which can be thought of as constituting "regulatory ecosystems." Regulatory actors will have to develop new strategies for maximizing the effects of these polycentric authority structures. Moreover, most private safety regulation currently faces northward. It protects developed country ("northern," hereafter) interests, and has only haltingly and partially incorporated the voices and interests of developing country ("southern," hereafter) producers and publics. To achieve effective and sustainable transnational governance, private import safety regulation will have to pioneer signifi cant new ways of incorporating the interests of southern countries and coordinating them with the interests of northern ones.