The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of 'standards markets', this paper examines this tension and studies how different social movement and industry-driven standards organizations compete as well as collaborate over governance in transnational arenas. Based on an in-depth case study of sustainability standards in the global coffee industry, we find that the ongoing co-existence of multiple standards is being promoted by the interplay between two countervailing mechanisms: convergence and differentiation. In conjunction, these mechanisms are enabling the emergence and persistence of a market for standards through what we describe as meta-standardization of sustainable practices. Meta-standardization leads to convergence at the 'rules of the game' level, but allows also differentiation at the attributes level, which is enabling parties to create and maintain their own standards. Our study helps to advance the understanding of transnational governance by explaining the dynamics of competing and collaborating non-state actors in constituting a standards market.

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While scholars have explained how business has increasingly taken on regulatory roles to address social and environmental challenges, less attention has been given to the process of how business is made responsible for wicked problems. Drawing on a study of 'conflict minerals' in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we examine the process through which companies became responsible for a humanitarian crisis. We contribute by: (1) bridging insights from contentious performance and deliberative approaches -to present a model of corporate political responsibilization for a wicked problem that explains how a 'field frame' of responsibility can emerge; (2) explaining shifting boundaries between public and private responsibilities and the changing role of the state as catalytic rather than coercive; and (3) showing how responsibility can be attributed to a target by framing an issue and its root cause in ways that allow such an attribution, and how the attribution can diffuse and solidify.

Original citation:Reinecke, Juliane and Donaghey, Jimmy. (2015) After Rana Plaza : building coalitional power for labour rights between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations. Organization, 22 (5). pp. 720-740. Permanent WRAP url:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/72034 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher's statement:Published version of the article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508415585028 A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Abstract:Global labour governance has typically been approached from either industrial relations scholars focusing on the role of organised labour or social movement scholars focusing on the role of social movement organisations in mobilising consumption power. Yet, little work has focused on the interaction of the two. Using an exploratory case study of the governance response to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article examines how complementary capacities of production and consumptionbased actors generated coalitional power, and contributed to creating the "Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh", making it binding and convincing more than 180 brand-name companies to sign up. The research has implications for understanding how the interface between production and consumption actors may provide leverage to improve labour standards in global supply chains. Keywords

The global coffee sector has seen a transformation towards more 'sustainable' forms of production, and, simultaneously, the continued dominance of mainstream coffee firms and practices. We examine this paradox by conceptualizing the underlying process of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a series of long-term, multi-dimensional interactions between civil society and corporate actors, drawing from the neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony and passive revolution. A longitudinal study of the evolution of coffee sustainability standards suggests that PCSR can be understood as a process of challenging and defending value regimes, within which viable configurations of economic models, normativecultural values, and governance structures are aligned and stabilized. Specifically, we show how dynamics of moves and accommodations between challengers and corporate actors shape the practice and meaning of 'sustainable' coffee. The results contribute to understanding the political dynamics of CSR as a dialectic process of 'revolution/restoration', or passive revolution, whereby value regimes assimilate and adapt to potentially disruptive challenges, transforming sustainability practices and discourse.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Industrial Democracy are two paradigmatic approaches to transnational labour governance. They differ considerably with regard to the role accorded to the representation of labour. CSR tends to view workers as passive recipients of corporate‐led initiatives, with little attention paid to the role of unions. Industrial Democracy centres on labour involvement: those affected by governance need to be part of it. Examining the Bangladesh Accord and Alliance as governance responses to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article offers a comparative perspective of how Industrial Democracy‐oriented and CSR‐oriented initiatives translate into differences in implementation. The article highlights that while CSR can foster effective problem‐solving in the short run, Industrial Democracy is necessary to build governance capacities involving workers in the long run.

Abstractthe specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between allowing local adaptation of a management practice and retaining control over the practice? By studying the adaptation of a specialized quality management practice ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence) in a multinational corporation in the aerospace industry, we examine how the organization manages the adaptation process at the corporate and subsidiary levels. We identified three strategies through which an organization balances the tension between standardization and variation preserving the he subsidiary level;; 1) creating and certifying progressive achievement levels;; 2) setting discretionary and mandatory adaptation parameters;; and 3) differentially adapting to context -specific and systemic misfits. While previous studies have shown how and why practices vary as they diffuse, we show how practices may diffuse because they are engineered to vary for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities.

Global supply chains are part of the corporate strategy of many multinational companies, often with adverse effects on labor conditions. While employment relations scholars focus on a production‐oriented paradigm, revolving around interactions among employers, workers, and government, much of the activism motivating the development of private labor standards is based around companies' relations with their consumers. This article proposes an analytical framework conceptualizing the interface of employment relations and consumption relations within global supply chains, identifying four regimes of labor governance: governance gaps, collective bargaining, standards markets, and complementary regimes. Finally, we suggest a research agenda for examining the role of consumption relations in the changing nature of global labor governance. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.