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Based on fourteen empirical case studies, this far-reaching book explains why and how markets are organized, through examining the role of values and value work in markets. Economic values shape markets, as do sustainability, safety, decency, public health and democracy. Based on micro-process studies in a large number of markets, this innovative volume presents a typology of strategic responses to value plurality in markets and helps explain how such value work influences market reform. Value plurality may be reinforced and turned into open conflicts, but may also be played down in configurations that neutralize, align, balance, or hierarchize values. A multi-disciplinary work, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in markets, particularly in the creating, organizing and development of markets, including the consequences of such undertakings. It will also be an invaluable resource to politicians and their advisors, who often initiate market reforms or have to deal with the consequences of previous reforms

We have seen a worldwide increase in new nonstate, multi-stakeholder organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible behavior. These standard-setting arenas offer new channels for political participation for NGOs. Scholars have drawn attention to the rise and the role of NGOs in global politics, but there is less research on the power and long-term implications of NGO participation in transnational multi-stakeholder standard-setting. This article analyzes NGOs within three such global organizations: the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the International Organization for Standardization on Social Responsibility. Using a power-based perspective, we demonstrate the impact that NGOs can have on multi-stakeholder work. In doing so, we analyze four types of NGO power: symbolic, cognitive, social, and monitoring power. The article further emphasizes institutional, structural, and discursive factors within multi-stakeholder organizations that create certain challenges to NGO power and participation in the longer term.

Organizational analysts have remarked on the retreat from `hard' regulation by nation-states and the formal international bodies they have ratified, in favour of `soft' regulation, particularly in the form of standards issued by transnational bodies whose authority does not derive from state sovereignty. This article problematizes the role of international standardization in the current trend, and locates its new regulatory role in the Foucauldian theorization of political rationalities (or `rationalities of government') and the `technologies' that operationalize them. This strategy illuminates how an originally modest, technical instrument of socio-economic coordination has attained the salience, ubiquity and authority that it enjoys as a discursive practice in today's global regulation. Standardization constitutes a vital technology of government that serves the now dominant rationality in the international practice of government, neo-liberalism. Particularly in the development of management standards from the 1980s, the International Organization of Standardization has produced a vital relay in the practice of `government at a distance', and a platform for self-presentation to audit—an updated version of earlier `practices of the self'.

This enriching book provides a novel analysis of the organizational processes behind the establishment, maintenance, and challenges of non-state authority. In doing so, it compares three transnational, multi-stakeholder standard-setting processes: those of the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the International Organization for Standardization on the subject of social responsibility (ISO 26000). The authors theorize the fragility of authority defined as legitimate power. They examine the problematic nature of the long-term transnational multi-stakeholder work upon which this authority is based, including the risks of being ruled out by competing rule setters or being split apart by the centrifugal forces inherent in the multi-stakeholder logics