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Provides a detailed overview of the setting of European standards, focusing on the histories, organizational structures, and operating environments of the private standards‐setting bodies that have been given an increased role in negotiating rules for the single market. An analysis of these bodies (CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI) provides an important assessment of the new institutional framework created to govern markets. Given the importance of this new approach, this chapter provides an in‐depth insight into the reorganization of responsibilities and roles of the various public and private actors in managing regulatory policy in the single market. The standards‐setting process is complex, and the organizational culture and operating norms of the standards bodies are reviewed to illustrate the dynamics of cooperation and the cooperation required to reach a coordinated solution. Dealing with collective action problems due to differing interests and regulatory traditions, the chapter demonstrates the importance of problem solving, alliance formation, and strategic bargaining as well as the role of mutual trust, credibility, and reputation in achieving some form of agreement on European standards.

Standard setters are attempting to structure a single set of global accounting standards. This chapter examines the costs and benefits of such convergence and finds that it is not a viable solution. It outlines a system of “constrained competition” in standards, within which a small set of high-quality standards would offer the most feasible and flexible setting that would cope with increasingly global capital markets. Three alternatives of such competition — among countries, between exchanges, and competition at the firm level — are outlined and discussed. The chapter also discusses harmonization of audit oversight and enforcement worldwide, and stresses that quality assurance is more important than the convergence of accounting standards.

This chapter appraises the influence of Burchell et al. (1985) on interdisciplinary studies of accounting standardization and choice in financial reporting as social and organizational practices. It begins with a brief review of economics-based research streams including a priori accounting measurement theories and theorizations of accounting products as information commodities. These research paradigms provided few insights for understanding processes of accounting change. In contrast, Burchell et al. constructed a theoretically engaged analytical method to study financial accounting change that unpacked taken-for-granted assumptions and stimulated new research directions. Subsequent studies of financial accounting change are organized into three areas emphasized by Burchell et al. — accounting problematization, the social functioning of accounting and its articulation with other fields of action, and the unpacking of taken-for-granted assumptions and values contained within neo-classical economics perspectives on accounting regulation and change. The chapter concludes with suggested avenues for future research.

A standard is a common platform that allows products to work together. This chapter begins by describing the various types of standard-setting. It then offers a brief history of antitrust treatment of standard-setting organizations (SSOs). It sets forth the anticompetitive concerns of standard-setting, including the harm posed by buyer power known as monopsony. It compares these concerns to the significant procompetitive benefits that SSOs and their IP rules offer. It concludes by calling for Rule-of-Reason analysis for SSOs.

This chapter examines how companies affected by international product standards assess these standards and the extent to which they are able to influence rule-making in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Drawing on the results of a business survey among standards experts in firms in the United States and four European countries (Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), the chapter considers the importance of institutional complementarity in international standard-setting across five industries: chemicals; rubber and plastic products; medical instruments and medical devices; petroleum products; and iron and steel products. It shows that high complementarity between standard-setting institutions at the domestic level and the institutional structure of standardization at the international level favors European over American interests in ISO and IEC. By contrast, the relatively poor fit between U.S. domestic institutions and the international structure puts U.S. firms at a disadvantage.

This chapter shows how former strengths became debilitating weaknesses in the Japanese telecoms industry. NTT was the ‘locomotive’ which powered the industry with its ‘family’ of equipment suppliers in the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, it placed its bets on ‘competency enhancing’ ATM and ISDN, and fell victim to the ‘disruptive’ technology of TCP/IP. Strong relational ties with its suppliers led them as well to be weak competitors in the emergent Internet networking equipment industry, and a lack of new entrants forestalled alternatives from emerging within Japan. Japanese problems in international standard setting are identified, again betting on the established committee process and failing to engage in the fluid IETF process.

While there are substantial differences in the regulatory regimes, cultures, economic history, nature of government, and institutions among the countries surveyed in the book, these countries have also faced common problems. This chapter provides a comparative assessment of how differences in some of these factors have affected accounting, auditing, and corporate governance. It shows that diversity in financial reports prevails worldwide, and discusses various ways used by companies and users of financial reports to cope with this diversity. The appendix illustrates accounting diversity by describing crucial differences among international financial rules and standards (IFRSs) and national standards, in particular, U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

This chapter examines the distributional consequences of shifting rule-making to the international private and nonmarket sphere. In particular, it asks who wins, who loses, and why when international standard-setting takes place in private focal rule-making institutions. It considers what is distinctive about the politics of rule-making in these transnational institutions, what defines power in these organizations, and how it operates. The chapter answers these questions using institutional complementarity theory. It first provides an overview of the institutional setting of nonmarket private governance, focusing on actors and sources of power, before discussing institutional complementarity, effective representation of domestic interests at the international level, and timeliness of involvement and information. It shows that domestic standardization systems characterized by institutional hierarchy facilitate the accommodation of the new institutional layers of standardization activity above the national level.

This chapter considers the various interventions of the political institutions in the labour law field both in their own right, and in the context of the approach of the Court (analysed in detail in Chapter 4). Harmonization, minimum standard-setting, and the open method of coordination (OMC) are discussed with reference to their capacity to achieve the integrationist, economic, and social objectives of the European Union, and to the constraints imposed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. The Working Time Directive and Lisbon Strategy are subjected to close scrutiny.

This chapter on the “innovation commons” examines both the socially beneficial and the harmful explanations given for joint research, joint production, and standard setting. It argues that IP collaborations are often best understood as a way of compensating for IP systems that have divided rights into tiny pieces with uncertain boundaries. These rights cannot be gainfully used unless they are reassembled. Importantly, the arguments for both individual appropriation and commons management are economic. Exclusion by legal process has a cost, and in intellectual property regimes these costs are particularly high because the boundaries are so ambiguous. A firm invests in the creation and defense of individual boundaries only to the extent that the gains from exclusion are greater than those from cooperation. The line of equipoise between these two costs identifies the boundary between individual and community management.

This chapter explores the role that community forms of social organization play in transnational standard setting. The chapter compares the evolution of two cases through time — the International Competition Network/Community and the Creative Commons Community. Those two transnational communities exhibit quite distinct features and character. The International Competition Network has been, from the start, a selective and exclusive community bringing together public or quasi-public agencies to buttress an existing and dominant agenda. The Creative Commons community, on the other hand, emerged as a bottom-up, civil society based social movement, constructed around a challenger agenda with an inclusive grass-roots philosophy. The comparison of those two quite different cases shows that each of those communities deployed strategies to deal, through time, with their own particular weaknesses and that both have been quite successful in their overall objective to strengthen and spread a given standard across multiple boundaries.

This chapter focuses on administrative rule-making by private or semi-private parties. It discusses important developments in EU administrative law in this direction, including coregulation and self-regulation, especially the practically relevant subject of European standard setting.

Intellectual property (IP) maintained its predominance over antitrust in the first decade of the 21st century. This chapter starts by looking at Microsoft, the most prominent antitrust case in recent years, exploring the IP aspects of the U.S. and European Union cases. It then examines innovation markets, standard-setting organizations, and patent pools before concluding with settlements and other activity in the pharmaceutical industry.

This chapter explores the implications of analyzing private law as a regulatory technique. It analyzes the special strength of private law regulation of contracts compared to other styles of regulation in terms of its ‘reflexive’ capacity. It then examines the structural weakness of private law as a regulatory instrument. The chapter focuses on detecting how these weaknesses in the capacity of private law can be overcome, and how private law itself is evolving mechanisms that enable it to address these weaknesses.

This chapter surveys regulatory approaches to promoting the standardization of information flows. It begins with an overview of the differences between technical and content standards and the considerations that guide the development of each. For example, with respect to content standards (such as for company disclosures and accounting), it discusses the relative advantages of rules-based and principles-based standards and the challenges of standardizing opinions and estimates or imperfect substitutes. It then considers the merits and drawbacks of establishing standards through regulatory processes and of delegating standard-setting authority to self-regulatory or private standard-setting bodies. It concludes with a discussion of techniques for regulating the funding, governance, and processes of private standard-setting bodies and ensuring fair access to privately developed standards.

This chapter considers the role of International Labour Organization (ILO) on the protection of the right to strike. The constitutional objectives of the ILO and the form of its standard-setting mechanisms arguably made the adoption of conventions concerning freedom of association imperative. These were, in turn, to provide the basis for the protection of a right to strike, by virtue of the jurisprudence developed by the ILO supervisory bodies, which also made reference to the terms of the ILO Constitution.

The regulatory agencies in pollution control map out the boundaries and contours of the deviance they police by setting standards that define what is regarded as ‘pollution’. This chapter explores that process and some of its dilemmas.

This chapter introduces some of the technical protocols that enable the Internet’s fundamental interoperability. It explains the institutional framework responsible for these protocols and some of the procedural traditions and organizational challenges that have accompanied the rise of new nongovernmental global institutions. It also addresses how protocols can have significant public policy implications and examines procedural routes to legitimacy for this privatization of governance.

Chapter VII takes on the case study of standard-setting, which has been addressed by EU law in various ways, including the use of product standards as an alternative to legislation through the so-called ‘New Approach’ and the mandatory notification of Member State technical regulations. More recently, it has emerged as an important topic in competition and free movement law. The importance of standardisation as an instrument of EU industrial and trade policy is reflected in the relatively lax application of free movement and competition law, at least when it comes to standardization by officially recognised bodies. At the same time, EU legislation and competition law (including the Horizontal Co-operation Guidelines) have been used to impose good governance standards such as transparency and participation on standard-setting organizations (SSOs). The chapter debates the limits of EU law as applied to standard-setting, addressing in particular the principle of mutual recognition.