MPIfG - Podcasts: Tim Bartley

Tim Bartley
Rethinking Transnational Governance: Private Rules, Public Law, and Possibilities for Reform
Scholar in Residence Lectures Series 2017
"Rules and Rights in the Global Economy"

Download audio podcast

Tim Bartley's lectures will focus on global rule-making projects and their implications for industries, workers, environments, and communities. Neoliberal globalization has often appeared unruly, with rapidly changing flows of money, products, and people producing new challenges for governments, citizens, and companies. Yet the rise of global production architectures has also been accompanied by rule-making projects of various sorts, including those concerned with fairness, sustainability, and justice for marginalized residents. More than empty symbolism but less than a transformation of capitalism, these rules are shaping the practices of companies, NGOs, and governments in subtle and contradictory ways. The lectures will examine the consequences of rules for land and labor and develop a new theory of transnational governance.

Lecture 2
This presentation will focus on the normative implications of Bartley's research on transnational private regulation. For the past two decades, transnational governance has mostly meant voluntary subscription to privately developed global standards. But as the limits of this approach have become clearer, new models have emerged that seek in various ways to harden soft commitments. In the governance of land and labor, we can see several emerging approaches, including a new transnational timber legality regime and a turn toward binding agreements and domestic law in pursuit of decent work in the global factory. The presentation will identify the processes behind these reforms and argue for a style of "place-conscious" transnational governance that re-centers the state while still using global production networks as infrastructures for enforcement.

Important publications

Bartley, T.: Institutional Emergence in an Era of Globalization: The Rise of Transnational Private Regulation of Labor and Environmental Conditions. In: American Journal of Sociology 113(2), 297–351 (2007).

Bartley, T.: Transnational Governance and the Re-Centered State: Sustainability or Legality? In: Regulation and Governance 8(1), 93-109 (2014).

Bartley, T.: Shaming the Corporation: The Social Production of Targets and the Anti-Sweatshop Movement (with C. Child). In: American Sociological Review 79(4), 653-79 (2014).

Bartley, T.: Beyond Decoupling: Unions and the Leveraging of Corporate Social Responsibility in Indonesia (with N. Egels-Zandén). In: Socio-Economic Review 14(2), 231-55 (2016).

Bartley, T.: Looking Behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer (with S. Koos, H. Samel, G. Setrini, N. Summers). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2015.

Tim Bartley is the MPIfG Scholar in Residence for the 2017 summer term. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ohio State University. His research focuses on transnational governance, private forms of regulation, social movements, and corporate responsibility and sustainability. He is an economic and political sociologist who uses a variety of methodological approaches in his research, from quantitative analyses of firm- and individual-level data to in-depth interviews and case studies. He is a former editor of the journal Regulation & Governance, has previously taught at Indiana University, and has been a visiting scholar at Princeton, MIT, and Sun Yat-sen University.