Lasse Folke Henriksen

Transnational organizing: Issue professionals in environmental sustainability networks

An ongoing question for institutional theory is how organizing occurs transnationally, where institution building occurs in a highly ambiguous environment. This article suggests that at the core of transnational organizing is competition and coordination within professional and organizational networks over who controls issues. Transnational issues are commonly organized through professional battles over how issues are treated and what tasks are involved. These professional struggles are often more important than what organization has a formal mandate over an issue. We highlight how ‘issue professionals’ operate in two-level professional and organizational networks to control issues. This two-level network provides the context for action in which professionals do their institutional work. The two-level network carries information about professional incentives and also norms about how issues should be treated and governed by organizations. Using network and career sequences methods, we provide a case of transnational organizing through professionals who attempt issue control and network management on transnational environmental sustainability certification. The article questions how transnational organizing happens, and how we can best identify attempts at issue control.

The global network of biofuel sustainability standards-setters

The role of network structure in shaping the regulatory scope and content of sustainability standards for biofuels is examined. A critical review of the literature on hybrid governance networks suggests the need to bring in network theory. Through a specific network analysis of the standards-setters, it is shown that not only does the institutional hybridity of the standards boards influence the regulatory scope of the standards, but the network centrality and specific topology in which standards-setters are embedded are equally important structural features of hybrid governance. These findings foreground the relevance of incorporating in the current attributional conception of hybridity a network element, taking seriously the role of network structure in shaping regulatory fields. Social Network Analysis as an analytical tool holds great potential for further research into the structural features of hybrid governance.

A Standard Fit for Neoliberalism

Social scientists and historians writing on techniques of contemporary rule, particularly those influenced by post-Marxist paradigms such as governmentality, have become increasingly preoccupied by the expanding role of standardization and the subjection of an ever-expanding array of spheres of activity to inspection (or self-inspection), audit, and certification. In the course of their investigations, the elements of a common narrative are emerging. This links standardization, audit, and certification with neoliberalism and contraction of the state, on one hand, with a reconfiguration of everyday life in business, communication, and social provision on the other (see Power 1997; Brunsson and Jakobsen 2000; Strathern 2000; and Higgins and Larner 2010). In this narrative, neoliberalism is differentiated from other forms of government by a rationale of “governing at a distance”: that is, by an invocation of indirect administration of the economic and social sphere via a decentralized network of politically autonomous norm-setting entities. Moreover, “governing at a distance” is depicted as having been by and large successfully and comprehensively institutionalized, especially in more markedly neoliberal social formations such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. This has occurred as “governmental technologies” such as systems of managerial controls on financial and operational reporting, and methods for auditing their quality, that have been disseminated throughout society by a combination of compulsion, provision of incentives, and imitation. “Governing at a distance” in these forms is said to entail “governing through standards.” In essence, it is a response to perceived economic or, more simply, budgetary problems associated with “governing too much” or too directly, particularly in social provision. However, it is also depicted as entailing wider ideological