The Power of Standards

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? Jean-Christophe 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. This book is also available in Open Access.

Jean-Christophe Graz is Full Professor of international relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Historiques et Internationales (IEPHI) of Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, and co-founder of the Centre d’Histoire Internationale et d’Etudes Politiques de la Mondialisation (CRHIM). He is also honorary visiting professor at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London.