Re-centering the State

Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

Transnational private regulation has brought reforms to forests and factories but rarely of an empowering or transformative kind. This chapter draws out normative implications of the research in this book and highlights paths toward improvement. While not dispensing with supply-chain scrutiny altogether, the chapter calls for revising the rating of corporate responsibility, re-centering the state, and shifting toward “place-conscious” transnational governance. Some elements of this approach can already be seen in a new transnational timber legality regime, which has the potential to overcome the limits of private sustainability standards. The chapter explains the rise of this regime and considers the possibilities for extending the legality framework to labor.

Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

Social scientists have theorized the rise of transnational private authority, but knowledge about its consequences remains sparse and fragmented. This chapter builds from a critique of “empty spaces” imagery in several leading paradigms to a new theory of transnational governance. Rules and assurances are increasingly flowing through global production networks, but these flows are channeled and reconfigured by domestic governance in a variety of ways. Abstracting from the case studies in this book, a series of theoretical propositions specify the likely outcomes of private regulation, the influence of domestic governance, the special significance of territory and rights, and several ways in which the content of rules shapes their implementation. As such, this theory proposes an explanation for differences across places, fields, and issues, including the differential performance of labor and environmental standards.


Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

A vast new world of transnational standards has emerged, covering issues from human rights to sustainability to food safety. This chapter develops a framework for making sense of this new global order. It is tempting to imagine that global rules can and should bypass corrupt, incapacitated, or illegitimate governments in poor and middle-income countries. This assumption must be rejected if we want to understand the consequences of global rules and the prospects for improvement. After showing how a combination of social movements, global production networks, and neoliberalism gave rise to transnational private regulation, the chapter builds the foundations for the comparative approach of this book. The book’s comparative analysis of land and labor in Indonesia and China sheds light on two key fields of transnational governance, their implications in democratic and authoritarian settings, and the problems of governing the global economy through private regulation.


Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these rules through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary rules actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders? This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labor standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented “on the ground” but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, this book reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.


1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 554-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Grantham

THE concept of ownership is a complex, powerful and controversial idea. In law it explains, justifies and gives moral force to a host of rights and duties as well as serving to legitimate the allocation of wealth and privilege. The influence of this idea is, furthermore, everywhere embodied in the law. In company law, legal and economic conceptions have both rested on and have been shaped by the normative implications of ownership. Historically, ownership was the principal explanation and justification for the central role of shareholders in corporate affairs. As owners, shareholders were entitled to control the management of the company and to the exclusive benefit of the company's activities. Ownership also served to legitimate the corporate form itself. So long as it was owned by individuals the economic and political power of the company was both benign and a bulwark against the intrusion of the state.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-374
Author(s):  
Marcos Livato ◽  
Gideon Carvalho de Benedicto

The new "molds" of competitiveness have suggested that the attentions should be focused on an efficient management of the supply chain in the supermarket departments, starting from the producer until the end user of the products, reducing the operational costs. It's known that the elimination of some of these stages of intermediation of the ways of distribution can represent to the small and mediums retailers an important competitive advantage, with the elimination of the additional costs charged by the intermediaries. The objective of this work is to propose a model of restructuring  of the ways of distribution in the brazilian retail of  food through of the strategy, inducing the elimination of the intermediaries. The search of the bibliography was used like basement to the definition of the methodology of this search, that was realized through of an observational study realized with nineteen Central Business Supermarket s in the state of São Paulo. To do the collection of the datas was prepared a questionary with specific questions. After the collection of the datas and tab, were used techniques quantitive  of analysis of datas through of SAS system. The study intends to discuss the proposal of the cooperation's networks like a strategic alternative, with the possibility of elimination of some phases of intermediation of the distribuition's ways.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612110536
Author(s):  
Jonathan White

The making of modern authority centred on efforts to formalise and de-personalise power, and transnational orders such as the European Union have often been viewed as an extension of that project. As this article argues, recent developments tell a different story. More than a decade of crisis politics has seen institutions subordinated to and reshaped by individuals and the networks they form. Locating these tendencies in a wider historical context, the article argues that greater attention to informality in transnational governance needs to be paired with greater recognition of the normative questions it raises. Just as a separation between rulers and the offices of rule was central to the making of modern legal and political structures, the weakening of that separation creates legitimacy problems for contemporary authorities both national and supranational. Rather than acclaimed as flexible problem-solving, the step back from institutions should be viewed as a challenge to accountable rule.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin R. Sears ◽  
Peter Cronkleton ◽  
Medardo Miranda Ruiz ◽  
Matías Pérez-Ojeda del Arco

On-farm timber production is an important subsistence and economic activity of smallholder farmers around the world. Farmer investment in wood production and the degree of formality in the sector depends on access to and conditions of the market, the nature of the regulatory frameworks that govern rights to and movement of timber, and access to financing. We evaluate the process of formalization of a thriving and adaptive existing supply chain for small-dimension lumber originating in the fallows of smallholder farmers in the Peruvian Amazon. Through field research over three years based in semi-structured interviews with diverse actors in the Amazon, we found that the supply chain for fallow timber is driven entirely by informal and some illegal transactions. A key reason for this is the lack of an appropriate regulatory mechanism by which producers can gain authorization to harvest and sell this timber. We identify conditions necessary to formalize this sector, and evaluate the degree to which these are met under several scenarios. We recommend that the state develop mechanisms that recognize property rights of long-term residents and establish a simple fallow forestry registration mechanism; and that local governments or non-governmental organizations adopt adaptive and collaborative approaches to support farmers and provide training, information and networking among actors. State recognition of and support for fallow forestry, coupled with producers organizing for collective action on processing and marketing their timber, could result in the formalization of a significant volume of timber, improvements in income security for rural people, and the development of local entrepreneurial activities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-428
Author(s):  
Patricia Girrbach

Corporate Responsibility focuses on economic performance, the protection of the natural foundations of life and social responsibility. In this context it is important to deal carefully with the limited resources available to take care of inter- and intragenerational justice by preserving the resource base. Due to the fact, that digitalization changes whole industry, a change in detail a more holistic view on responsibility is necessary. Corporate Responsibility must be enhanced to Corporate Digital Responsibility in terms of digital aspects. In this context this paper provides insights into Corporate Digital Responsibility from the perspective of blockchain usage in supply chain management.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (04) ◽  
pp. 1650014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad El Ouardighi ◽  
Gary Erickson ◽  
Dieter Grass ◽  
Steffen Jørgensen

The objective of the paper is to study how wholesale price and revenue sharing contracts affect operations and marketing decisions in a supply chain under different dynamic informational structures. We suggest a differential game model of a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a single retailer that agree on the contract parameters at the outset of the game. The model includes key operational and marketing activities related to a single product in the supply chain. The manufacturer sets a production rate and the rate of advertising efforts while the retailer chooses a purchase rate and the consumer price. The state of the game is summarized in the firms’ backlogs and the manufacturer’s advertising goodwill. Depending on whether the supply chain members have and share state information, they may either make decisions contingent on the current state of the game (feedback Nash strategy), or precommit to a plan of action during the whole game (open-loop Nash strategy). Given a contract type, the impact of the availability of information regarding the state of the game on the firms’ decisions and payoffs is investigated. It is shown that double marginalization can be better mitigated if the supply chain members adopt a contingent strategy under a wholesale price contract and a commitment strategy under a revenue sharing contract.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fang Wu ◽  
Junhai Ma ◽  
Yaping Li

According to the current power supply focused reform in China, a dual-channel and multienergy supply chain model is constructed. The supply chain has a new energy enterprise, a traditional energy enterprise, and the State Grid that is the retailer. New energy company and traditional energy company sell electricity to the State Grid at wholesale prices, and at the same time they enter the market to retail power products. Multiequilibriums and their practical significance are discussed. The complex dynamic is investigated using a bifurcation diagram, Lyapunov exponent, parameter basin, and fractal dimension. In this multilayer supply chain network, the price adjustment of the State Grid will make the entire supply chain face greater volatility risks, and dual-channel suppliers, that is, new energy and traditional energy companies are also involved in this volatility. Further, considering the sticky information, the sticky expectation of electricity price is built for studying the lagging electricity price. The dynamic characteristics of the sticky model are investigated, and new phenomena are discovered: 3-orbit bifurcation and mutation appear with fractals. This means that prices continue to swing and oscillate on three tracks. Through comparison of the fractal dimension, an important conclusion is discovered: the purpose of sticky expectations for electricity prices is to stabilize price fluctuations, but sticky expectations make the market more complicated. The article provides a strategic reference for exploring the power market in China.


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