How Standards Rule The World

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.

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.

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of global prosperity and security?In Rules for a Flat World, law and economics professor Gillian Hadfield points to an outdated legal infrastructure as the cause of stagnating progress in the global economy.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.

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.

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.

Our Choice: Democracy or Corporate Rule A handful of corporations and financial institutions command an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in an assault against markets, democracy, and life. It's a “suicide economy,” says David Korten, that destroys the very foundations of its own existence. The bestselling 1995 edition of When Corporations Rule the World helped launch a global resistance against corporate domination. In this twentieth-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a New Economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.

This book reviews bureau-type organizations delivering network goods, documenting how most global institutions greatly improved their effectiveness during the last few decades. In the current globalized world, the design and choice of appropriate institutional rules and procedures can result in effective and democratic global government.

Rules for the Global Economy is a timely examination of the conditions under which international rules of globalization come into existence, enabling world economic and financial systems to function and stabilize. Horst Siebert, a leading figure in international economics, explains that these institutional arrangements, such as the ones that govern banking, emerge when countries fail to solve economic problems on their own and cede part of their sovereignty to an international order. Siebert demonstrates that the rules result from a trial-and-error process--and usually after a crisis--in order to prevent pointless transaction costs and risks. Using an accessible and nonmathematical approach, Siebert links the rules to four areas: international trade relations, factor movements, financial flows, and the environment. He looks at the international division of labor in the trade of goods and services; flow of capital; diffusion of technology; migration of people, including labor and human capital; protection of the global environment; and stability of the monetary-financial system. He discusses the role of ethical norms and human rights in defining international regulations, and argues that the benefits of any rules system should be direct and visible. Comprehensively supporting rules-based interactions among international players, the book considers future issues of the global rules system.