The Power Of Standards: Hybrid Authority And The Globalisation Of Services

Description

Standards often remain unseen, yet they play a fundamental part in the organisation of contemporary capitalism and society at large. What form of power do they epitomise? Why have they become so prominent? Are they set to be as important for the globalisation of services as for manufactured goods? Graz draws on international political economy and cognate fields to present strong theoretical arguments, compelling research and surprising evidence on the role of standards in the global expansion of services, with in-depth studies of their institutional environment and cases including the insurance industry and business process outsourcing in India. The power of standards resembles a form of transnational hybrid authority, in which ambiguity should be seen as a generic attribute, defining not only the status of public and private actors involved in standardisation and regulation, but also the scope of issues concerned and the space in which such authority is recognised when complying to standards. Cover......Page 1 Half-title......Page 3 Title page......Page 5 Copyright information......Page 6 Contents......Page 7 Figures......Page 8 Tables......Page 9 Acknowledgements......Page 10 1 Introduction......Page 13 Globalisation and Transnational Private Authority......Page 16 Standards and Regulation......Page 18 Globalisation and the Rise of Services......Page 22 Insurance and the Financialisation of Contemporary Capitalism......Page 25 Business Services, Development Policies, and India......Page 27 Methods......Page 28 The Book in Brief......Page 31 2 The Rise of Transnational Hybrid Authority: A Primer......Page 36 Why Hybrids Now?......Page 38 What Hybrids Are......Page 46 How Hybrids Work......Page 53 Hybrid Actors......Page 55 Hybrid Objects......Page 58 Hybrid Spaces......Page 60 3 Service Offshoring: The New Frontier of Globalisation......Page 66 The Test of Tertiarisation......Page 70 The 75/25 Puzzle......Page 78 Restrictive versus Extensive Hypotheses......Page 82 Standards-Defying Services?......Page 91 4 Standards as Regulation......Page 98 The Institutional Environment......Page 100 The ISO Setting......Page 104 The European Approach......Page 106 The United States: A Special Case......Page 111 Towards New Transatlantic and Transpacific Promises?......Page 115 Service Standards and Institutional Ambivalences......Page 121 5 Doubling Security: Prudential Standards for Insurance Regulation......Page 126 Insurance: That Obscure Object of Global Finance and Governance......Page 129 Supervising and Regulating Insurance after the Crisis......Page 134 The Astonishing Power of Solvency II......Page 137 A Basel for Insurers......Page 144 6 Standards to Create New Insurance Markets......Page 152 Life Insurance after the Crisis......Page 154 Longevity Risk and the Design of Lifemetrics......Page 156 At the Heart of (Re)Insurance Standards......Page 163 Exchange Data......Page 164 Reinsuring NatCat......Page 166 Reporting Sustainably......Page 174 7 The World Office: Standards and Business Process Outsourcing in India......Page 185 India and the Not-So-Flat World of Services......Page 188 How It All Began......Page 190 Where Standards Come In......Page 192 We Provide Whatever the Client Asks For!......Page 194 What is Standardised?......Page 197 Who Sets the Standards?......Page 204 Where is the Indian Office of the World Standardised From?......Page 208 From Standard Takers to Standard Makers: The Power of Nasscom......Page 210 How ISO/IEC 30105 Came to Life......Page 214 8 Conclusions......Page 221 References......Page 235 Index......Page 258