This book explains how international standards have come to specify almost all aspects of society, While resting on buzzwords such as ‘trust’ and ‘confidence’, the global control regime leaves us with a faceless bureaucratic system with no name and no one in charge. Using empirical and in depth analysis , the author discusses the consequences for responsibility: if no one is in charge, then no one is to be held accountable for how standards rule the world.
Worldwide, half a million people die from air pollution each year-more than perish in all wars combined. One in every five mammal species on the planet is threatened with extinction. Our climate is warming, our forests are in decline, and every day we hear news of the latest ecological crisis. What will it really take to move society onto a more sustainable path? Many of us are already doing the "little things" to help the earth, like recycling or buying organic produce. These are important steps-but they're not enough. In Who Rules the Earth?, Paul Steinberg, a leading scholar of environmental politics, shows that the shift toward a sustainable world requires modifying the very rules that guide human behavior and shape the ways we interact with the earth. We know these rules by familiar names like city codes, product design standards, business contracts, public policies, cultural norms, and national constitutions. Though these rules are largely invisible, their impact across the planet has been dramatic. By changing the rules, Ontario, Canada has cut the levels of pesticides in its waterways in half. The city of Copenhagen has adopted new planning codes that will reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2025. In the United States, a handful of industry mavericks designed new rules to promote greener buildings, and transformed the world's largest industry into a more sustainable enterprise. Steinberg takes the reader on a series of journeys, from a familiar walk on the beach to a remote village deep in the jungles of Peru, helping the reader to "see" the social rules that pattern our physical reality and showing why these are the big levers that will ultimately determine the health of our planet. By unveiling the influence of social rules at all levels of society-from private property to government policy, and from the rules governing our oceans to the dynamics of innovation and change within corporations and communities-Who Rules the Earth? is essential reading for anyone who understands that sustainability is not just a personal choice, but a political struggle.
The country's leading libertarian scholar sets forth the essential principles for a legal system that best balances individual liberty versus the common good.
"World Rule is essential reading for scholars, managers, and policy makers interested in the rules that underpin the global economy. Koppell authoritatively and convincingly explains the origins of the dense network of global rules and elucidates their effects on both markets and practices; his theoretical insights into the politics of organizations are profound." Rawi Abdelal, Harvard Business School.
For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business environment, elevating standards worldwide, and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce, the EU has managed to shape policy in areas such as data privacy, consumer health and safety, environmental protection, antitrust, and online hate speech. And in contrast to how superpowers wield their global influence, the Brussels Effect - a phrase first coined by Bradford in 2012- absolves the EU from playing a direct role in imposing standards, as market forces alone are often sufficient as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. The Brussels Effect shows how the EU has acquired such power, why multinational companies use EU standards as global standards, and why the EU's role as the world's regulator is likely to outlive its gradual economic decline, extending the EU's influence long into the future.
Global private regulations—who wins, who loses, and why Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule making has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. The New Global Rulers examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses--and why. Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli examine three powerful global private regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, which develops financial reporting rules used by corporations in more than a hundred countries; and the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, which account for 85 percent of all international product standards. Büthe and Mattli offer both a new framework for understanding global private regulation and detailed empirical analyses of such regulation based on multi-country, multi-industry business surveys. They find that global rule making by technical experts is highly political, and that even though rule making has shifted to the international level, domestic institutions remain crucial. Influence in this form of global private governance is not a function of the economic power of states, but of the ability of domestic standard-setters to provide timely information and speak with a single voice. Büthe and Mattli show how domestic institutions' abilities differ, particularly between the two main standardization players, the United States and Europe.
How can we promote economic progress in a staggeringly complex global system? In the bestselling book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman argued that technology and globalization have leveled the playing field among workers and innovators worldwide. But why, ten years after he proposed thisthesis, are billions of people around the world still locked out of global prosperity and security?In Rules for a Flat World, law and economics professor Gillian Hadfield points to an outdated legal infrastructure as the cause of stagnating progress in the global economy. The world's biggest corporations are struggling to manage workers, and advance a consistent strategy, in dozens of countriesat once. Small businesses are being crushed by disruption a hemisphere away. Billions of people who constitute the bottom of the economic pyramid are still shut out of the technological, legal, and medical advancements that the other half of the world enjoys. Put simply, the law and legal methods onwhich we currently rely have failed to evolve along with technology. Hadfield argues not only that these systems are too slow, costly, and localized to support an increasingly complex global economy, but also that they fail to address looming challenges such as global warming, poverty, andoppression in developing countries.Instead of growing more agile and less expensive, our legal infrastructure is drowning in costs and complexity, all the while growing less capable of responding to the needs of businesses, governments, and ordinary people. Through a sweeping review of the emergence and evolution of law overthousands of years, Hadfield makes the case that our existing methods of producing law-via legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies-need supplementing. Markets, she argues, have the capacity to spur investment in regulation so that we can better manage smarter, faster, and more complicated economicsystems. Combining an impressive grasp of the empirical details of economic globalization with an ambitious re-envisioning of our global legal system, Rules for a Flat World is a crucial and influential intervention into the debates surrounding how best to manage the evolving global economy.
We live in a world ruled by standards. From toys and computers to corporate social responsibility, from the drycleaner in Nairobi to the Swedish radiation safety authority - international standards specify almost all aspects of society. This book questions how this is made possible. Standards need support in order to work and Ingrid Gustafsson explores how a control regime built on standards, certifications and accreditations can emerge over time and grow global. The global control regime is nurtured mainly by the questions connected to globalization: how can we trust things from other parts of the world? While resting on buzzwords such as 'trust' and 'confidence', the global control regime leaves us with a faceless bureaucratic system with no name and no one in charge. This has severe consequences for responsibility: if no one is in charge, then no one is to be held accountable for how standards rule the world. This is particularly pertinent because the author shows how states are embedded in standards to a much higher degree than previous research has shown.Offering in depth analysis, this book will be enjoyed by scholars and researchers of organizational theory, global governance and public administration.
"The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy. In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s—trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies—had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier. How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, “managed” globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today."
Assembling compelling and unprecedented evidence, "Political Standards: Accounting for Legitimacy" documents how in subtle ways the rules of corporate accounting a critical institution in modern market capitalism have been captured to benefit industrial corporations, financial firms, and audit firms. In what is perhaps the only independent overview of the accounting industry, Karthik Ramanna begins with a history of corporate accounting and an accessible explanation of how it works today, including the essential roles it plays in defining the fundamental notion of profitability, facilitating asset allocation, and ensuring the accountability of corporations and their managers. From the evidence, Ramanna shows how accounting rule-makers selectively co-opt conceptual arguments from academia and elsewhere to advance the views of the special-interest groups. From this, Ramanna moves on to develop more broadly a new type of regulatory challenge that of producing public policy in a thin political market. His argument is that accounting rules cannot be determined without the substantial expertise and experience of groups that by definition also have strong commercial interests in the outcome." Political Standards" concludes with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem in accounting and that of thin political markets in general, charting avenues for scholarship and practice. Certain to be an eye-opening account of a massive industry central to the modern business world, "Political Standards "will be an essential resource in understanding how the rules of the game business are set, whom they inevitably favor, and how they can be changed for the better of society."
