Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy

By Josh Whitford. Contemporary Sociology, 2019

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this book, Tim Bartley writes with the authority that comes from being a patient researcher of the “concrete implications” (6) of the private transnational rules that have come to characterize the current international business environment. Private regulation has become ubiquitous, such that terms like ‘audit’, ‘soft law,’ and ‘compliance’ are now familiar to us all. However, Bartley quickly disabuses the reader of any illusion that such private systems of rules based on the “reputational investment” of corporations, the “moral authority” of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the “assessment capacity” of auditing and certification bodies are reliable and trustworthy in implementation (2). Focused on two sectors, forestry and apparel manufacture, Bartley provides a cross-country comparison of the implications of transnational rules for the two “fictitious commodities” of land and labor (Polyani 1944: 75–76) in Indonesia and China, and examines how such rules are implemented in the context of domestic governance structures. This book is a welcome and much needed contribution to our understanding of how micro and macro contexts interact in different international settings (see Cushen and Thompson 2016: 361) and is, in my judgement, a thoughtful and well-written volume that makes for essential reading. ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 25 Issue 1 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.916 | jwsr.pitt.edu

Subfields: Law, Soil Science

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