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 pol- itical 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.
Author(s): J. Christophe Graz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 258
City: Cambridge
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Globalisation and Transnational Private Authority
Standards and Regulation
Globalisation and the Rise of Services
Insurance and the Financialisation of Contemporary Capitalism
Business Services, Development Policies, and India
Methods
The Book in Brief
2 The Rise of Transnational Hybrid Authority: A Primer
Why Hybrids Now?
What Hybrids Are
How Hybrids Work
Hybrid Actors
Hybrid Objects
Hybrid Spaces
3 Service Offshoring: The New Frontier of Globalisation
The Test of Tertiarisation
The 75/25 Puzzle
Restrictive versus Extensive Hypotheses
Standards-Defying Services?
4 Standards as Regulation
The Institutional Environment
The ISO Setting
The European Approach
The United States: A Special Case
Towards New Transatlantic and Transpacific Promises?
Service Standards and Institutional Ambivalences
5 Doubling Security: Prudential Standards for Insurance Regulation
Insurance: That Obscure Object of Global Finance and Governance
Supervising and Regulating Insurance after the Crisis
The Astonishing Power of Solvency II
A Basel for Insurers
6 Standards to Create New Insurance Markets
The Cost of Not Dying
Life Insurance after the Crisis
Longevity Risk and the Design of Lifemetrics
At the Heart of (Re)Insurance Standards
Exchange Data
Reinsuring NatCat
Reporting Sustainably
7 The World Office: Standards and Business Process Outsourcing in India
India and the Not-So-Flat World of Services
How It All Began
Where Standards Come In
We Provide Whatever the Client Asks For!
What is Standardised?
Who Sets the Standards?
Where is the Indian Office of the World Standardised From?
From Standard Takers to Standard Makers: The Power of Nasscom
How ISO/IEC 30105 Came to Life
8 Conclusions
References
Index
