Business and Politics

Call for Papers

for a special issue on
‘Multiplicity and Plurality in the World of Standards’

Guest editors:

Marie-Laure Djelic (ESSEC Business School, Cergy Pontoise, France)
Kristina Tamm Hallström (SCORE and Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden)
Frank den Hond (VU University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Deadline for paper submissions: August 31, 2012

Over the past years, the literature on standards setting, diffusion and adaptation has moved away from a relatively narrow preoccupation with technical standards to embrace a much broader trend: the multiplication of standards, standard setting arenas and compliance mechanisms. Standards have come to impact most spheres of economic and social life, quite often with a transnational scope and reach. Standards are designed to create new institutions in the global economy, by providing institutional logics in and between private and public sectors across national and sector boundaries. We live, it seems, in a "World of Standards".

As a result of scholarly exploration into the broad field of standards, we now understand better what transnational standards are and how they contribute to the regulation and governance of organizations and behaviors. We also have a much better sense of the nature and complexities of the standard setting process and its dynamics over time. At the same time, though, our collective exploration has uncovered an unexpected and quite paradoxical evolution. While standardization would seem to suggest regularities, rationalization, and a reduction of diversity if not homogeneity and convergence, we can easily document a surprising multiplicity and plurality in our transnational world of standards. In most industries, fields and arenas, we find multiple standards and standard setting kernels. In some situations, those standards and standard setting kernels compete fiercely; in other situations they appear to be rather complementary; they can also co-exist in stable form with little contact; they could finally come to combine through time with some degree of hybridization. We suggest that such multiplicity and plurality generate a whole set of new questions and therefore constitute an important frontier for the literature on transnational standards and standard setting.

The Special Issue seeks to address some of these key questions around transnational standards, including:

• How can we explain the emergence and persistence of multiple standards and standard setting kernels?
• To what extent is the multiplicity and plurality of standards in a field a stable situation?
• What are the different paths in which multiplicity and plurality can reveal and express themselves – competition, complementarity, entrenchment, indifferent co-existence, hybridization?
• When and how do standards disappear?
• How do organizations and other actors respond to and cope with the multiplicity and plurality of standards?
• What is measured by various standards and what are the organizational consequences following the adaptation of several standards that may or may not belong to the same kernel?
• How does this multiplicity and plurality of standards articulate with the multiplicity and plurality of implementation contexts?
• Do we find traces of a standardization of standards – a kind of meta-standardization of standard setting processes that would provide a background homogeneity to the apparent multiplicity and plurality?

Although we encourage papers with a strong empirical base, conceptual papers will not be excluded. We envision a Special Issue in which papers vary according to their methodological grounding (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods), analytical strategy (case studies, network analysis, longitudinal), level of analysis (organizational, industry, field, inter-industry, inter-field),theoretical orientation, and empirical setting. In particular, we welcome contributions that explore fields and/or regional settings that have been under-researched (such as non-OECD parts of the world).

Submissions

Please submit your paper through the Business and Politics website (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bap – please note that you will be requested to use or create a login account), clearly indicating that your paper is to the Special Issue on Multiplicity and Plurality in the World of Standards. The deadline for submission is 31 August, 2012. All submissions will be submitted to the journal’s regular double blind review process. Any papers accepted for publication but not included in the Special Issue will be published later, in a regular issue.

For further information, or to register as a reviewer, please contact any of the Guest Editors: Marie-Laure Djelic (djelic@essec.edu) Kristina Tamm Hallström (fkt@hhs.se) Frank den Hond (f.den.hond@vu.nl)

Business and Politics (ISSN: 1469-3569) has been published since 1999 as a peer-reviewed electronic journal. It focuses on original research in the broad area of the interaction between firms and political actors.

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Editor-in-Chief

Vinod K. Aggarwal, Department of Political Science and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

Associate Editors

Maxwell Cameron, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia
Cédric Dupont, The Graduate Institute, Geneva
Thomas Gilligan, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas, Austin
Witold Henisz, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Keith Krehbiel, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
John Ravenhill, Department of International Relations, Australian National University

Managing Editor

Chloe Thurston, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Assistant Managing Editor

Do-Hee Jeong, University of California, Berkeley

Editorial Board

Rawi Abdelal, Harvard Business School, Harvard University
Stephen Ansolabehere, Department of Political Science, MIT
Pierre Allan, Department of Political Science, University of Geneva
David Baron, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Roxana Barrantes, Institute of Peruvian Studies
Rakesh Basant, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Jean-Philippe Bonardi, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne
Benjamin Cashore, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University
David Coen, University College London
Heribert Dieter, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin
Maurizio Ferrera, Department of Political Science, State University of Milan
John de Figueiredo, Anderson School of Business, UCLA
Rui de Figueiredo, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
P.N. Ghauri, Department of Management, King's College, London
Stephan Haggard, The School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California at San Diego
Richard Higgott, Department of Politics and International Studies and Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Gary Hufbauer, Institute of International Economics, Washington D.C.
Merit Janow, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
David Kang, School of International Relations and Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California
Ethan Kapstein, INSEAD
Peter Katzenstein, Department of Government, Cornell University
Robert Lawrence, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Seungjoo Lee, Department of Political Science, Chung-Ang University
Kun-Chin Lin, Department of Politics, National University of Singapore
Steven McGuire, School of Management and Business, Aberystwyth University
Helen Milner, Department of Politics, Princeton University
Chung-in Moon, Department of Political Science, Yonsei University
Amrita Narlikar, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Kalypso Nicolaïdis, University of Oxford
Louis Pauly, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Aseem Prakash, Department of Political Science, University of Washington
Barak Richman, School of Law, Duke University
Kenneth Shadlen, London School of Economics and Political Science
James Snyder, Department of Political Science, MIT
Debora Spar, Barnard College
Paula Stern, The Stern Group, Washington, D.C.
Emerson Tiller, School of Law, Northwestern University
Shujiro Urata, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University
Rick Vanden Bergh, School of Business Administration, University of Vermont
Daniel Verdier, Department of Political Science, Ohio State University
David Vogel, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Douglas Webber, INSEAD
Barry Weingast, Department of Political Science, Stanford University
Richard Whitley, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Oliver Williamson, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Carol Wise, School of International Relations, University of Southern California
Zhang Yunling, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing