This chapter engages with theories of global governance and private regulation to explain how and why standards support what I call a transnational hybrid authority. It shows that the notion of hybrid is mostly used as a default attribute to accommodate multiple and contradictory policies of global governance. Supplementing international political economy literature with semiotics, science and technology studies, and post-colonial studies, I argue that the concept of hybrid allows for seeing such ambiguity as an ontological attribute transforming the relationship between transnational capitalism and territorial sovereignty. Ambiguity thus imbues not only the status of the actors involved in standardisation and regulation but also the scope of the issues on which they operate and the spaces on which they exert their authority. The chapter outlines the analytical framework of the book including the three dimensions of actors setting standards, the scope of the standards and space on which such authority is recognised.

This chapter looks at insurance standards used to create new markets or reinforce existing ones. It unveils a number of little-known standards that are instrumental in pushing the frontier of highly innovative and securitised insurance markets ever further. It first provides a detailed analysis of the project that insurers, pension schemes and investment banks developed over several years for a standardised solution to pass over to capital markets the risk associated with longer and different expectations in populations’ longevity – known as ‘longevity risk’. Then it shows the significance of standardised data exchange formats in various lines of insurance markets. A case in point is how the world’s largest reinsurers took decades to standardise the exposure to natural hazards risks included in their portfolio. Another one, though not confined to insurance, is the standardised guidelines used for extra-financial reporting and developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Evidence gathered in this chapter suggests that, although those standards largely belong to a logic of market creation and rationalisation, compliance remains ambiguous and falls short of a mere transnationalisation of capital accumulation.

This chapter looks at a least-likely case of highly immaterial and deeply relational services. It provides an in-depth analysis of India’s achievement as the top business service offshoring location in the world and of the significant role played by standards. It offers a historical reconstruction, with an emphasis on how standards played a crucial role in the emergence of a wider spectrum of market institutions than those usually accounted for by the State–market divide of the existing literature. It then analyses the rise and range of international standards and certified management tools used in business process outsourcing in India. In contrast to conventional accounts that relational and intangible services are hard to standardise and, hence, internationalise, the analysis sheds light on the prominence of service standards in India and their ambiguous authority. Finally, the chapter focuses on the particular role of Nasscom, the voice of the Indian IT service industry, including its successful sponsorship of the adoption of a new ISO standard for business process outsourcing services.

This is the first of two chapters focused on standards likely to support the internationalisation services in a supposedly most-likely case (the insurance industry being far from the ideal type of relational, non-material services). Both show that the standardisation of insurance is paved with difficulties. This substantiates the extensive hypothesis set in the , according to which setting service standards is less dependent on intrinsic attributes of the industry than on broader power configurations. This first chapter is focused on the regulation side of the insurance industry in the post-crisis era. After some background on the insurance industry, it examines the European Directive Solvency II – the most ambitious regulatory overhaul ever undertaken for insurance industries – and how it set the stage for developments at the global level under the aegis of the International Association of Insurance Supervision (IAIS) and regulatory policy reforms in the United States. In contrast to views focused on the ingrained power of either public regulation or private securitisation, I show that ambiguous transfers of authority pervade the three private-public, technical-societal, and national-transnational dimensions of my analytical framework.

This chapter looks at the various institutions providing authority to standards as de jure or de facto regulatory instruments governing the internationalisation of services in contemporary capitalism. It provides background on the institutional environment of the WTO, the ISO setting, the European and the American systems, as well as on the prospects of the new generation of preferential trade agreements, such as the Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). It shows the intricate and manifold ways in which the ambiguity of the world of standards supports its power across institutional specificities. This not only goes against the view of a compelling transatlantic divide. It also calls for mitigating speculations on the prospects of current and future mega-trade agreements against the setbacks initiated by the Trump administration. With or without deals, the ambiguity on which the authority of standards feeds the regulatory environment of capitalism is here to stay.

Standards set by bodies such as the International Organization for Standards (ISO) have long been perceived as narrow technical specifications for organising production, protecting consumers and facilitating international trade in domains such as measurements, performance and related effects of manufactured goods. Today, their scope has been extended to non-physical fields such as labour, environment, education, risk and security, or management systems and business models. While the ISO might not be the best known organisation of global governance, it fiercely competes with other bodies in a jungle of labels, certifications, and benchmarks. This chapter introduces how the book focuses on the role of standards in the global expansion of services as a new form of power in contemporary global political economy. It reviews the contribution to the existing literature in five interrelated debates, often at the crossroads of several disciplinary fields. It presents the methodology and briefly outlines the subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the relationship among globalisation, the expansion of the tertiary sector and the growing authority conferred on standards. It outlines the contextual and conceptual background on services and situates opposing arguments on the potential role of standards in supporting the globalisation of services. There is a common understanding that trade in services differs from goods and relies on standards (for quality, safety, protection of consumers, etc.) often embedded in domestic regulation and likely to impede market access. This makes the internationalisation of services dependent on sectorial and institutional specificities – a restrictive hypothesis that rejects broader power configurations. I contend that an international political economy perspective allows for a more extensive hypothesis by assuming that issues of quality and security, conventionally seen as the heart of the regulation of services, should be understood as social institutions, whose qualification remains highly political. Appraised as particular instances of transnational hybrid authority, service standards can accommodate opposing political economy objectives and power configurations across sectorial and institutional specificities.

This concluding chapter ponders the non-conventional form of power that international standards reflect in the rising importance of services for contemporary capitalism. It discusses the three core arguments made in the book on the power of ambiguity, the ambiguity of standards and the rise of services, with distinct reference to the contrasted cases studied. It then draws broader implications of conceiving the power of service standards as a transnational hybrid authority defined by its constitutive ambiguity, rather than by sectorial or institutional specificities.

This book has examined three case studies of policy areas in which it is possible to observe dynamics of hyper-active governance. In each area, politicians must manage the dual demands of relying upon ‘independent’ experts in delegated agencies – what Alasdair Roberts (2011) called the ‘logic of discipline’ – with a wish to impose democratically legitimated state authority – a ‘logic of democracy’. This tension is constantly managed, and the international analysis of developments in each policy area and process-tracing cases identify the distinctive dynamics in each area. These were summed up in terms of three styles: defence (the protection of expert independence), empowerment (the provision of resources to experts to tackle policy problems) and inclusion (the reform of agencies to include diverse stakeholders and conceptions of expertise). This chapter looks at how these styles can be distinguished more clearly from one another. In particular, it argues that the ‘defence’ style can operate alongside the ‘empowerment’ and ‘inclusion’ styles, both in the institutional design of agencies and how they work in practice.