Partisanship and institutionalization are more important to group formation and dynamics than is often recognized in the literature on interest groups. This study examines the contrasting cases of small business group formation and dynamics in Japan and the United States to demonstrate how opposition to the party or parties in power was crucial to the timing and nature of the largest small business organizations formed in both countries. Parties are also important to subsequent developments in the organization and institutional interactions of the sector. It is these processes which explain the divergent outcome whereby the US small business sector is identified with the political right and the small business in Japan with the political left.

Despite a considerable push by policy-makers to incentivize green business practices, take-up of environmental initiatives amongst North American retailers has been highly uneven. While some “big-box” retailers have launched ambitious environmental initiatives, others continue to conduct business as usual. This paper asks: why do some mega-retailers commit to ambitious environmental agendas while others in the same sector do not? And how can the answer to this question improve public policy? I investigate these questions using comparative case studies of four North American big-box retailers: Wal-Mart, Target, Costco and Kroger. My findings suggest that the socialization of senior executives through multi-stakeholder sustainability networks is the critical variable accounting for progressive environmental practices in some corporations and not others. This finding suggests that existing public policies that focus on making the business case for sustainability are based on incomplete assumptions about why companies “go green.” It further suggests that socialization theory can help explain broader instances of corporate social responsibility and proposes that scholars in this field should devote more attention to the composition of socializing groups.

Globalization is often described as a chaotic process which signals the end of national institutions’ ability to regulate markets. However, a closer look reveals a new world of standards and regulations, often with a transnational scope and reach. Contemporary rule making and rule monitoring increasingly take place in the context of transnational arenas that bring around the table many different types of actors, all of whom have or feel to have a “stake” in the regulatory project at hand, yet often for quite diverse reasons and with varying interests. While standardization would seem to suggest regularity, rationalization, and a reduction of diversity if not the advance of homogeneity and convergence, we can easily document a surprising multiplicity and plurality in our transnational world of standards. In most industries, fields and arenas, we find multiple standards and standard setting coalitions. Even so, scholars have only barely started to explore this multiplicity and plurality. Building upon what we know on technical standards, this Symposium describes and explains important patterns in the world of transnational standard-setting, revealing the nature of this plurality and the ways in which it impacts upon and is impacted by different groups of actors involved.

Analyses of transnational governance formation point to the destabilizing effects transnational standard setters have upon national institutional configurations. Isomorphic pressures, it is argued, lead to the standardization of procedures used and actors involved in standard setting processes. What is not clear, however, is to what extent this meta-standardization increases the chances for convergence of national with transnational standards. This article explores this question for the case of the international accounting standard for off-balance-sheet financing in the Netherlands, France and Germany. It argues that the reconfiguration of domestic governance architectures had a decisive impact on convergence processes. Counter-intuitively, copying goals, membership and procedures of the transnational, private International Accounting Standards Committee limited the chances of rule convergence, as it threatened to deinstitutionalize the standard-setting role of an important national champion of rule-convergence, the banking regulator. The institutional template developed at the transnational level created actor-mismatch at the national level between those formulating and those implementing the rules, thereby weakening the coalition for rule change. A strong coalition, however, is needed to overcome vested business interests that favor convergence with transnational templates for legitimacy gains at the same time that they oppose convergence to contentious rules that limit their business activities.

This paper explores the plurality of institutional environments in which standards for the service sector are expected to support the rise of a global knowledge-based economy. A wide range of international bodies is able to define standards affecting the internationalization of services. Relying on global political economy approaches, the analysis uncovers the power relations underpinning the various forms of standards supporting a deeper integration of the market for services. Service standards are conceived as heterogeneous forms of transnational hybrid authority. The empirical study focuses on recent developments in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the European Union, and the US. In contrast to conventional views opposing the American system to the ISO/European framework, the paper argues that institutional developments of service standards are likely to face trade-offs and compromises reflecting contrasting models of standardization, not only between, but also across, those systems. While this undermines the conventional analysis of a transatlantic divide in standardization, it also shows that the variance between product and service standards is much greater in the European context and the ISO system than in the US, where it is hardly debated.

Amid concerns for a regulatory void in transnational fields, the principle of private regulation has become institutionalized. Many sectors have seen the emergence of multiple and overlapping standards. When comparing the sectors, there is considerable variation in standard multiplicity. We build on three institutional perspectives that have been put forward to explain the emergence of sustainability standards – the economic, idealist and political-institutional perspectives – to analyze the phenomenon of standard multiplicity. Each perspective reflects a different kind of action logic and is simultaneously present and accessible to various parties involved. Based on a cross-sector analysis of standards multiplicity in the forestry, coffee and textile sectors, this article seeks to make two contributions. First, whereas these three perspectives have been presented as competing, we propose that they are complementary in offering partial explanations for different episodes in the dynamics underlying standards multiplicity in different sectors. Second, whereas most studies have analyzed standard setting in single sectors and thus have understood it as being an intra-sector phenomenon, our cross-sector analysis of the dynamics of standard setting suggests that it is propelled by both sector-specific contingencies and experiences as well as by the experiences from other sectors.

Standards for “ethical” goods provide activists and mission-driven producers with opportunities to clarify decisions for so-called “ethical consumers” and spur growth in these new markets. But certification schemes also raise monitoring challenges, and may confuse consumers and create opportunities for cooptation by large corporate competitors. In this interview-based study, we examined the localism movement to understand why social movement leaders might resist harmonization of standards. We find that leaders define “local” in at least five ways, and argue that they resist harmonization of local for pragmatic, philosophical, and strategic reasons. We conclude that tolerance for multiple standards could be beneficial for core activists in market-oriented social movements. If and when these groups turn more systematically to the political system, maintaining loose and multiple standards may impede policy success. The “buy local” case suggests, however, that as long as the market remains activists’ primary mechanism for social change, decentralized governance and multiple standards in ethical markets allow activists to maintain a powerful voice in defining ethical products and business practices.