About the Book
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 standards 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 standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually 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 labour 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, Rules without Rights reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative
politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational
governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research
design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all
central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
Table of Contents:
1: Transnational Standards and Empty Spaces
2: A Substantive Theory of Transnational Governance
3: Purity and Danger: The Dilemmas of Sustainable Timber in Indonesia
4: The State Strikes Back: Forest Certification in Authoritarian China
5: Beneath Compliance: Corporate Social Responsibility and Labor Standards in China
6: Contentious Codes: The Contested Implications of Labor Standards in Indonesia
7: Re-Centering the State: Toward Place-Conscious Transnational Governance?
About the Author :
Tim Bartley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and studies globalization, regulation, and social movements. He has published articles in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, and a number of other journals. His 2015 book, Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer, examined the meaning of 'voting with your dollars' and the impacts of
voluntary standards for sustainable and/or fair production of food, forest products, apparel, and electronics.
Review :
...Rules without Rights provides us rich detail to deepen our understanding of the crowded spaces at the heart of global production.
Tim Bartley writes with the authority that comes from being a patient researcher of the 'concrete implications' of the private transnational rules that have come to characterize the current international business environment... This book is a welcome and much needed contribution to our understanding of how micro and macro contexts interact in different international settings and is, in my judgement, a thoughtful and well-written volume that makes for essential reading.
Rules without Rights, given its theoretical and empirical richness, should be read widely by scholars and students of comparative politics, labor studies, and management, if they wish to take on the challenge of refining theories concerning transnational governance, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and standards.
This book provides a major contribution to analysis of the failure of private rules on sustainability and labour standards in global production networks. It provides a critical way forward through 're-centering' the state in the public and private governance of land and labour rights in a global economy.
Bartley brings together factory workers and forests in China and Indonesia in an elegant comparative design that combines careful empirical grounding with analytical breadth and sophistication. Rules without Rights is a signal accomplishment and a significant step forward for the literature on the interaction of transnational governance and state regulation.
In Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy, Tim Bartley explores the role of private regulators, serving global consumers, in promoting forestry sustainability and labor standards in both China and Indonesia. The evidence is dark and disturbing. Private regulators are frequently misled by forest and factory managers who bluff, delay, and lie. In the end, private regulators often do little to promote sustainability or human rights, and are no more effective than national regulators who serve local masters. Rules without Rights establishes an ambitious new research agenda for students of modern, transnational, capitalism.
Corporate codes of conduct purport to transcend the wider political economy: insulating islands of better work, notwithstanding civil society crackdowns and countervailing incentives. Yet, such claims are misleading, Bartley demonstrates. Although brands ostensibly support freedom of association, many source from authoritarian countries, quashing the autonomous labour movements that mobilise for better pay, conditions and rights. Current sourcing practices thus incentivise repression. Enough of this pretence, insists Bartley. Buyers must become legally responsible for abuses in their supply chains. Extra-territorial liability would encourage more âpatient sourcingâ (longer-term contracts) in low- and middle-income countries with autonomous labour movements, rewarding good practice. Is this possible? Yes! - exclaims Bartley, highlighting an inspirational example from forestry.
