certifying forests and factories: states, social movements...

10.1177/0032329203254863ARTICLEPOLITICS & SOCIETYTIM BARTLEY

Certifying Forests and Factories: States, Social

Movements, and the Rise of Private Regulation

in the Apparel and Forest Products Fields

TIM BARTLEY

Systems of private regulation based on certification have recently emerged to

address environmental issues in the forest products industry and labor issues in the

apparel industry. To explain why the same regulatory form has emerged across these

fields, the author uses a historical and comparative case study approach, closely

examining early moments and paying attention to “roads not taken.” Two types of

factors led to the initial emergence of private certification: (1) social movement

campaigns targeting companies and (2) a neo-liberal institutional context. The

analysis shows specific ways in which these factors led states, nongovernmental

organizations, and companies to build or support certification associations.

Keywords: private regulation; certification; sweatshops; deforestation; corporate

social responsibility

Recent decades have seen dramatic shifts in the regulation of industries away

from traditional “command and control” strategies—based on fixed standards

enforced by the state—and toward regulatory forms based on different social con-

trol strategies—like market mechanisms, the provision of information, and infor-

For comments and discussions on earlier incarnations of this article, I thank Andrew Jones, Lis

Clemens, Marc Schneiberg, Mary Nell Trautner, Ron Breiger, Mark Chaves, Joe Galaskiewicz,

Charles Ragin, W. Richard Scott, Kieran Healy, and the Politics & Society editors. For help with initial

contacts, I thank Jill Esbenshade, Jason McNichol, Dara O’Rourke, and Ruth Rosenbaum. Thanks

also to all those who were so generous with their time and expertise in interviews. Any shortcomings of

the article, of course, rest solely with the author. This research was supported in part by grants from the

University of Arizona Faculty Senate Task Force for Monitoring Labor and Human Rights Issues and

the University of Arizona Department of Sociology.

POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 31 No. 3, September 2003 433-464

DOI: 10.1177/0032329203254863

© 2003 Sage Publications

433

mal shaming processes.1 Often, these are controlled by different types of actors as

well—various types of private groups rather than government agencies. One regu-

latory form that rose to prominence in the 1990s is the private certification associ-

ation. Here, nongovernmental associations certify companies on the basis of their

social or environmental performance. These associations embody a new regula-

tory form that uses certification and the provision of information to address the

impact of industry operations. Large-scale certification programs emerged across

two otherwise very different industry contexts in the 1990s—the apparel industry,

where certification associations focus on labor conditions and the problem of

sweatshops, and the forest products industry, where they focus on environmental

conditions and deforestation. This not only supports the image of certification as a

general regulatory form but also raises questions about why it has emerged at

these particular places and times.

This article explains why remarkably similar systems of private regulation

have emerged in the apparel and forest products fields in North America. I use a

comparative case study approach to examine the processes by which this distinc-

tive set of institutional arrangements for regulating corporate activity was created.

By identifying similarities across the trajectories of the two cases, I find two

dynamics that explain the rise of private certification systems. One set of dynam-

ics resulted from social movement campaigns that targeted companies—from

demonstrations against Nike’s labor practices in Indonesia to protests of Home

Depot’s sales of tropical timber. The other set of processes is linked to an interna-

tional institutional context of neo-liberalism and free trade, which led both state

and nonstate actors to support private, rather than public, forms of regulation.

Rather than seeing certification and other “corporate social responsibility” initia-

tives as merely reflections of larger trends, I show specific ways in which social

movement strategies and neo-liberal institutional arrangements led to the forma-

tion of private regulatory associations, rather than other solutions—like intergov-

ernmental regulatory structures. Through this, I develop some more general ideas

about the links between globalization, institutions, and the emergence of new reg-

ulatory forms.

The Rise of Certification Associations

Private certification programs emerged in both the apparel and forest products

fields in the 1990s, as shown in Figure 1, which is based on mentions of certifica-

tion in selected trade journals.2 Forest certification efforts took off somewhat

more rapidly than labor standards certification, but both were rising to promi-

nence in the mid-1990s.

By the end of the decade, there were three overarching forest certification pro-

grams and three overarching labor standards certification programs operating in

North America.3 The Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Forestry Initiative,

and CSA-International address forest management, while the Fair Labor Associa-

434 POLITICS & SOCIETY

tion, Social Accountability International, and Worldwide Responsible Apparel

Production focus on labor conditions. Through programs like the Forest Steward-

ship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, firms like Home Depot and

International Paper have had timber sources certified as “sustainable.” Through

initiatives like the Fair Labor Association and Social Accountability Interna-

tional, companies like Nike and Liz Claiborne have had contractors’ factories in

Latin America and Southeast Asia inspected by external monitors.

While quality and technical certification have existed for a long time—through

Underwriters Laboratory, the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” and a vari-

ety of industry standards bodies—the use of certification to address the larger

societal and ecological impacts of production processes is rather new. This form

has emerged alongside a discourse of corporate social responsibility, a rise of part-

nerships between companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and a

range of experiments with corporate codes of conduct, sustainability reporting,

eco-labeling, social auditing, independent monitoring, and Fair Trade products.

At first, these trends may seem to be little more than responses to consumer

demand or public relations ploys. But with closer attention, both of these images

are lacking as explanations for certification programs. First, in contrast to the

notion that certification and labeling initiatives are merely responses to the rise of

socially and environmentally responsible consumerism, research on these pro-

grams suggests that stable markets for certified products rarely exist before the

programs are begun—at least not at a scale that would warrant the amount of

effort being put into these programs. Instead, making markets for certified prod-

ucts is part of a larger institution-building project that occurs along with the con-

struction of certification associations.4 Second, while it is tempting to reduce cer-

tification programs to nothing more than empty, corporate-sponsored public

relations rhetoric—and clearly this is the case for some initiatives—this does not

TIM BARTLEY 435

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forest productstrade journalarticles (ForestIndustries/WoodTechnologymagazine)

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Figure 1. Cumulative distribution of articles mentioning certification in forest products and appareltrade journals, 1990-2000.

fit easily with the active role that credible environmental, labor, and human rights

NGOs have taken in creating some of the earliest certification programs. Clearly,

the rise of certification is tied up with larger political dynamics and is worthy of

careful study.

The research literature on certification programs—coming out of both aca-

demic and practitioner circles—overwhelmingly treats labor standards and forest

certification separately.5 Few have noticed the similarity in these two types of cer-

tification,6 and none have systematically charted or explained that similarity. Yet

labor standards certification and forest certification programs are remarkably

alike—in form, function, and framing.

In both cases, certification associations are typically private, nonprofit organi-

zations, made up of coalitions of companies and NGOs. For example, the board of

the Fair Labor Association includes representatives of Liz Claiborne and the Law-

yers Committee for Human Rights. Social Accountability International includes

Toys R Us and the International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers’ Federa-

tion. Home Depot and Greenpeace both participate in the Forest Stewardship

Council, while Georgia-Pacific and Conservation International are affiliated with

the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. These partnerships have led some observers to

dub certification systems “the NGO-industrial complex.”7

Environmental and labor standards certification associations also carry out

very similar activities. In both cases, associations set standards, accredit other

organizations to inspect production sites and check companies’ compliance with

those standards, and then lend the name of the association, in some way, to compa-

nies that are found to be in compliance—sometimes through a product label.

Beyond their activities, there are striking similarities in the discourse sur-

rounding labor standards and forest certification—as shown in the two quotations

below. These two speakers work in different fields and have very different profes-

sional backgrounds. One is talking about forest certification and the other about

labor standards certification.

You have to understand, this is a non-governmental approach to trying to solve a problem.

And, to me, it’s reflective of the complexities of doing business today . . . and of the world

economy—that a lot of these problems are difficult to address by government action by

legislation. And . . . something like [this association] is very interesting because it’s a non-

governmental approach to solving what is really a public policy problem.8

So much of trade is . . . such a massive, complex, dense network . . . that you could never set

up a regulatory system that would cover it. . . . Compliance would be almost impossi-

ble. . . . There’s no mechanism to establish that kind of international regulatory framework.

So this is one that cut right to the chase and said “We’re going to empower consumers to buy

products that come from well-managed [sources].” And this tool was very direct and very

powerful and it was kind of captured everyone’s imagination.9

The first statement refers to labor standards, the second to forestry. Yet both talk

about the purpose and significance of certification in similar ways—as a means


for addressing problems posed by global supply chains that is more direct than

government action.

In sum, quite similar systems of private regulation of have emerged in these

two cases. This is surprising, considering that the politics of labor and the environ-

ment have historically tended to move on quite separate tracks. Furthermore, it

suggests that something beyond industry-specific politics may be driving the rise

of private certification as a new regulatory form. If so, then it should be possible to

identify factors and processes that are operating across industries and that have

helped bring about the rise of certification.

Toward an Explanation

Insights from institutional theories and research frame this study. Although a

variety of different “institutionalisms” exist, institutionalists of a cultural, histori-

cal, or rational choice bent tend to agree on the importance of understanding the

processes and mechanisms by which institutional arrangements are generated and

change.10 The emergence of institutions is a “bumpy” process, subject to a variety

of political and organizational problems.11 Building new institutions requires col-

lective action and is thus plagued by problems of free-riding and defection.12 Fur-

thermore, the organizations that push or carry institutionalization projects may

themselves fail, especially when resources are scarce or battles for legitimacy are

particularly fierce.13 It is by no means certain that the “right” institutions will

always emerge to address a particular problem. Thus, instead of explaining new

forms of private regulation by invoking their possible consequences (e.g., buffer-

ing global capitalism, facilitating flexible accumulation, shielding companies

from criticism, etc.), I seek to explicate the process by which individual and col-

lective actors built particular types of private regulatory programs, paying atten-

tion to the problems they encountered along the way.

Yet it is also important to remember that new organizational, regulatory, or

institutional forms rarely emerge on their own but rather out of competition

between alternative sets of solutions and conflicts between actors backing these.

Drawing on this notion, my explanation of the initial emergence of private regula-

tory institutions will look at other possible ways of addressing labor and environ-

mental problems and the factors that led certification to garner support from key

players. This approach resonates with a larger move in institutional and organiza-

tional theory toward seeing potential institutional arrangements as objects of

political contestation and strategic framing, moving beyond economic accounts

of institutional emergence that view institutions as merely efficient solutions to

problems14 as well as cultural views of institutions as primarily symbolic struc-

tures that diffuse widely and are adopted for ritualistic reasons.15 While emerging

institutions are indeed products of strategic problem-solving activity, as well as

some ritualistic borrowing and mimesis, they are best conceptualized as sets of

TIM BARTLEY 437

practices that are in competition to become dominant institutions, in a field shaped

by power, interests, and preexisting institutional arrangements.

ANALYTICAL APPROACH

I use a comparative case study approach to look at the development of certifica-

tion across two different fields—forest products and apparel. These are two

important cases of private certification systems that address the impacts of indus-

try operations, as opposed to certification of product quality and conformity to

technical specifications. Currently, a number of nongovernmental programs use

some form of certification or labeling in a way that addresses industry impacts—

including Fair Trade labeling programs for coffee, chocolate, and produce; inter-

national certification of organic foods; certification done by groups like the

Marine Stewardship Council and Sustainable Agriculture Network; and others.

Yet forest certification and labor standards certification make particularly good

selections for comparative analysis for two main reasons.

First, these appear to be the first programs that have attempted to address the

operation of entire industries, rather than building niche markets for products

made through uncommon practices, as has been the strategy in organics and Fair

Trade products. In this sense, forest certification and labor standards certification

programs are attempting to be more “regulatory” than some other labeling efforts,

although they clearly mix regulatory strategies with marketing ones. They are

therefore highly relevant for building theories of private regulation and industry

governance.

Second, apart from having private certification programs, the apparel and for-

est products fields are quite different from each other, in ways that provide analyt-

ical leverage for explaining the rise of certification. Analyzing these two cases is a

version of what some comparative methodologists have called a “most different

cases with a similar outcome” research design.16 A partial solution to the problem

of having too few cases and too many variables, the design rests on the argument

that factors shared by two otherwise dissimilar cases are more likely to be causally

relevant.17 While these two industries are not the most different cases imaginable,

they differ in at least two analytically important ways: For one, the central politi-

cal problems in each industry—labor in one case, environment in the other—are

different sorts of problems, not to mention historically segregated.18 So making

this comparison allows one to better understand certification as a general regula-

tory form, which may be filled with quite different contents. The second key dif-

ference between these two cases lays in the structure of production in each indus-

try. Apparel production tends to occur through decentralized supply chains with

multiple layers of contracting out. The production of forest products is much more

likely to happen in a small number of large, vertically integrated firms that own

land, harvest timber, produce lumber, operate pulp and paper plants, and some-

times even produce the chemicals for these processes, as with industry giants like


TIM BARTLEY 439

International Paper. These differences make it surprising to find the same regula-

tory form in both industries, since industry structure greatly affects the potential

of firms to engage in collective action to create or resist regulation.19 On the

whole, comparing forest and labor standards certification can provide a good deal

of analytical leverage for understanding the rise of private regulatory systems.

While a larger set of comparisons may also be helpful, this initial two-case com-

parison takes us far beyond the current norm of industry-specific case studies.20

My analysis focuses on the early moments in the emergence of certification

programs, to understand the ways in which regulatory options emerge and begin

to get institutionalized. I pay attention to processes occurring over time and to

sequences of events—taking, in effect, a historical approach to a contemporary

issue. Inspired by evolutionary imageries and theories of path dependence, histor-

ical institutionalists have increasingly used the “branching tree” model as a

framework for understanding the trajectories of economic and institutional

change.21 In this framework, the history of any organizational or institutional form

is filled with alternate paths, roads not taken, and different possible outcomes.

Furthermore, this style of analysis helps uncover the early elaboration and limita-

tion of alternative models that occurs both historically and analytically before

“lock-in” effects, path dependence, and diffusion take over.22

With these goals in mind, the first step in my analytic strategy was, for each

case, to examine the variety of options that actors considered, paying particular

attention to “roads not taken.” Since it is impossible to track all logically possible

pathways, I focus on those policies, strategies, and other types of programs into

which concerned groups and individuals poured substantial resources and energy.

The goal was to understand why some options flourished while others fell apart or

withered away. In other words, I looked at how paths that were at some point seen

as promising got blocked off or came to be seen as no longer worth the effort.

Next, I compared the narratives for each case, looking for similarities as a way of

beginning to specify causally relevant factors.

I used three sources of data to develop the case studies. I collected a range of

archival materials on certification programs, including charter documents,

reports, internal memos, Web pages, and articles from trade journals. In addition, I

drew on existing research (published and unpublished) on the industries, social

movement campaigns, policy processes, and private regulatory initiatives. Most

important, I conducted in-depth interviews with 37 key informants who had been

entrepreneurs of labor and environmental certification and/or monitoring pro-

grams. I began with a list of core contacts, generated from public communications

of certification associations and recommendations of other researchers of forest

certification or labor monitoring/certification. From this initial set of contacts, I

began interviewing and used snowball sampling to generate larger lists of poten-

tial informants. I focused in particular on getting interviews with individuals who

had been involved in the creation of a certification program or its early stages of

development. Interviews lasted between forty minutes and two hours, with a mean

length of approximately seventy-five minutes. I was primarily interested in the

information these individuals could provide about the organizations they had

worked with, and a significant portion of each interview was spent reconstructing

the histories of their programs, which provided extremely rich data for construct-

ing the case studies.

Case Background

No single set of actors is responsible for creating certification initiatives.

Instead, a number of actors—including states, social movements, NGOs, compa-

nies, and in the labor standards case, trade unions—have played roles at various

moments.23

Forest certification emerged as a response to campaigns about tropical defor-

estation and has so far focused primarily on wood products. The first overarching

forest certification body was the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), founded in

1993. The initial impetus for this program came out of discussions in the early

1990s among the Woodworkers Alliance for Rainforest Protection, individuals

with experience in community forestry in South America, and a few organizations

that had recently begun to perform their own certifications of forest products.24 As

the idea grew into an organization, environmental groups such as World Wide

Fund for Nature—or World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States—and

Greenpeace got involved, followed by a few companies, like the British home

improvement retailer B&Q and Home Depot.25 After the founding of the FSC,

several industry groups put together their own certification programs, and battles

over how to do certification ensued. This article focuses only on the moments

leading up to the creation of the FSC, not on later developments.26

Labor standards certification first emerged in the form of two associations,

which were both being created around 1996-97—the Fair Labor Association

(FLA, spawned by the Apparel Industry Partnership) and the Council on Eco-

nomic Priorities Accreditation Agency (CEPAA, later renamed Social Account-

ability International). The Apparel Industry Partnership was formed by the

Clinton administration, which convened meetings with the Union of Needletrades

Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!) and a group of companies and NGOs.

The Fair Labor Association emerged out of this group, with NGOs such as the

Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the International Labor Rights Fund

(ILRF), apparel manufacturers like Liz Claiborne, and the law firm of Arnold &

Porter taking the lead.27 The CEPAA was created by the Council on Economic Pri-

orities (a socially responsible investment organization), with input from compa-

nies, some other NGOs, and the multinational certification firm Société Générale

de Surveillance.28 Additional labor standards certification and monitoring pro-

grams emerged within the next few years, and debates about the credibility of

these programs raged. Here, however, my analysis focuses on the moments lead-

ing up to the formation of the FLA and the CEPAA, rather than on later events.29


Before turning to the explanation of the emergence of private regulatory pro-

grams, it is important to keep in mind some limits and potentials of these sorts of

systems for fundamentally altering the conditions of workers and the natural envi-

ronment. First, certification systems deal in reputation, which means they have

the potential effect of “greenwashing” reality, or cleaning up corporate images

without changing practices on the ground. In addition, these are privatized forms

of regulation, so they potentially conflict with democratic ideals of openness and

accountability. Since corporations typically play some role, whatever impacts

these programs may have will likely be limited—although not necessarily unsub-

stantial. Furthermore, their impacts depend on the enforcement activity of exter-

nal actors, like consumers, investors, suppliers, and so forth—without which they

have little power. Yet even given these limitations, certification programs repre-

sent something significant on the global governance scene. At their best, they

allow credible NGOs to “discipline” companies, temper corporate control of the

certification process, and help solidify linkages between social movements/civil

society in affluent countries and workers and forest-dependent communities in

the global south. The emergence of private regulation may also eventually have

unintended effects, for instance, by changing the structure of industries or shaping

the strategies pursued by activist groups. Ultimately, the impact of certification

may depend on who wins out in the competition to define and control this form—a

competition that is as of yet unsettled.

GENERAL FINDINGS: COMMON

THEMES ACROSS THE TWO CASES

Across these cases, two common themes explain why private systems for certi-

fying companies have emerged in both the apparel and forest products fields. The

first has to do with social movement pressure on companies. As I will show below,

as environmental, labor, and human rights groups waged campaigns that targeted

companies, it set in motion a series of battles between companies and their critics,

which led to a demand for more credible and standardized systems for evaluating

claims about the social or environmental impacts of industry operations. Actors

on both sides expressed some interest in developing these sorts of systems, even

though they usually disagreed on how such a system should work.

The second common element has to do with political action in a new global

institutional context, dominated by neo-liberal agendas and rules about free trade.

These “institutions of globalization” have affected the rise of certification in sev-

eral ways. As I will show below, through interactions with these institutional

structures, states and NGOs both turned toward private, nonstate solutions to

problems of labor rights and forest management. This happened through two pro-

cesses: as NGOs experienced repeated defeats in international arenas, they put

more energy and resources into developing nongovernmental programs. In addi-

tion, in a context of free trade rules that limit direct state action, governments put

TIM BARTLEY 441

money into private programs that were immune to rules about international trade.

In fact, state support has been a critical factor in the rise of private certification

associations, especially in the case of labor standards.

The next section of the article discusses each of these factors in more detail and

shows how they operated in the two cases at hand. Rather than presenting a full

case study for each field, I have organized this material around key analytic points.

Social Movement Pressure on Companies

In both the apparel and forest products fields, certification systems emerged in

a context of social movement activity and public controversy about the social or

environmental dimensions of the industry. As shown in Figure 2, attention and

discourse about tropical deforestation rose rapidly in the late 1980s and peaked

around 1989. The graph shows mentions of the terms rainforests or deforestation

in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.30

Similarly, labor standards certification systems emerged out of controversy

over child labor and sweatshops. This peaked in the mid-1990s, as shown in Fig-

ure 3, which charts the use of the terms child labor and sweatshops in these same

media sources. Much of this attention resulted from two high-profile scandals. In

1995, inspectors discovered a slave-shop in El Monte, California, in which Thai

immigrant workers were producing garments for the mainstream apparel market.

The following year saw a scandal involving TV talk show host Kathie Lee

Gifford, when labor rights groups spurred a media exposé showing that her line of

clothes for Wal-Mart was being produced by child laborers in Honduras. While

these trends illustrate the general context in which certification systems emerged,

more specific forms of interaction between social movement groups and industry

actors drove the creation of certification associations.


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Figure 2. The rise of public attention and controversy in the forest products field, 1980-2000.

Environmental Activism and Industry Responses

Environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth, the Rainforest Action

Network, Greenpeace, and WWF were largely responsible for focusing attention

on tropical deforestation. During the 1980s, environmental groups in Europe, and

particularly Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom, built sizeable campaigns

to boycott tropical timber.31 Similar campaigns emerged in the United States

somewhat later, led by the Rainforest Action Network. Beyond encouraging indi-

vidual consumer boycotts, environmental activists put direct pressure on compa-

nies involved in the timber trade. While tropical timber companies are rather

small and not well-known to the public, environmentalists found a target in large

do-it-yourself stores like B&Q in the United Kingdom and later Home Depot in

the United States. These campaigns often publicly embarrassed companies, for

instance, by filling the parking lots of home improvement stores with inflatable

chainsaws.32

In response to boycotts, tropical timber exporting companies began making

claims about the supposed environmental friendliness of their forest operations

and products. They sometimes labeled their products with authoritative-sounding

claims about sustainability and environmental protection. For instance, one

Malaysian company’s “Certificate of Products from Sustained Yield Manage-

ment” said, “The hardwood rainforest products supplied come from well-

managed production forests in accordance with the principle of sustained yield

management thus safeguarding the environment and the ecological balance.”33

Exporting governments sometimes made supporting statements. Ghana’s state-

ment is instructive: “We confirm that all Ghanaian tropical hardwoods supplied

TIM BARTLEY 443

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Figure 3. The rise of public attention and controversy in the apparel field, 1980-2001.

by [company name] come from forest resources which are being managed to

ensure a sustained yield of timber and other forest products in perpetuity and to

arrest forest depletion and environmental degradation.”34

Company claims making and attempts at self-certification spurred further crit-

icism from environmental groups. In 1991, the WWF-UK issued a report showing

that the vast majority of tropical timber firms’ claims about their environmental

friendliness could not even begin to be substantiated and called claims made by

tropical timber trade associations “a remarkable mix of fact, conjecture and

allusion together with a smokescreen of diverting but wholly irrelevant informa-

tion.”35 This report became the cornerstone of a series of credibility battles, result-

ing in what one participant called “a confusing deluge of claims and counter-

claims.”36 As one forester noted, “You might find one label which says ‘We plant

10 million trees for every tree we cut down.’ And you think, well, is that a good

thing or a bad thing? And then somebody else says ‘We buy our timber from only

sustainably managed forests.’ Well, you know, which product should I buy?”37 In

the environmental community, another observer recalled, “The problem was

defined as proliferation of dubious claims, confusion in the marketplace, and no

reliable mechanisms to leverage improvement for forest management.”38

Although companies’ claims to environmental friendliness were certainly

being contested in the environmental community, so were strategies of boycotting

tropical timber. The boycott strategy came under fire for hurting forest-dependent

populations in developing countries and for failing to stem the tide of deforesta-

tion. Some argued that boycotts devalued forest land, encouraged the conversion

of forest land to agricultural uses, and thus had the unintended consequence of

increasing deforestation.39 In this context, environmental groups—including

some who were endorsing boycotts—began experimenting with alternatives.

Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom—one of the proponents of boy-

cotts—began working on a system for recognizing environmentally preferable

sources of timber. By 1988, this group had developed a “Good Wood Seal of

Approval” and published its first Good Wood Guide.40 (In the United States, the

Rainforest Action Network followed a bit later, publishing the Wood User’s Guide

in 1991.) Yet soon the originators of these programs discovered that tracking

wood products through complex supply chains was beyond their capacity.41

Friends of the Earth discontinued the Good Wood Seal in 1990. Other groups, like

the Rainforest Alliance and Scientific Certification Systems, were beginning to

put together their own independent certification initiatives in the late 1980s as

well, and several of these groups would later help build an overarching association

to standardize and oversee certification—the Forest Stewardship Council.42

Tropical timber campaigns also led some wood products retailers to enter into

partnerships with environmental NGOs. In 1990, WWF forged a partnership with

the British home improvement retailer B&Q, and soon they were building a “buy-


ers group,” that is, a group of retailers that would commit to selling sustainably

produced wood products.43 By the next year, the “1995 Group” buyers group had

formed, and approximately twelve members had committed to sell only “sustain-

able” wood products by 1995.44 The important point here is that social movement

pressure was spawning partnerships that put retailers like B&Q in a position to be

potential supporters of a certification system that had yet to be developed.

In sum, as social movement organizations put pressure on tropical timber pro-

ducers and retailers, this created a demand for a more overarching system for eval-

uating claims about forest management, harvesting practices, and the use of the

infamously ambiguous term “sustainability.” In fact, environmental groups and a

few companies were both expressing some interest in a larger system that could

establish the credibility of some claims and discredit others.

Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Industry Responses

Throughout the 1980s, activists in the global South had led campaigns against

bonded child labor, and unions and immigrant groups had waged campaigns

against sweatshops in the United States. Yet the most visible anti-sweatshop cam-

paigns emerged in the early to mid-1990s. In 1992, the NBC TV show Dateline

broadcast an exposé on children making clothes in Bangladesh for Wal-Mart.45

Companies like Nike and The Gap were soon under fire for their outsourced oper-

ations in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Groups like the National Labor Com-

mittee, Global Exchange, Campaign for Labor Rights, and garment workers

unions have been responsible for mounting most of these campaigns. In general,

they have tended to target companies rather than governments and have attempted

to leverage negative publicity about image-conscious companies with recogniz-

able brand identities.

As companies were faced with media exposés, protests at their stores, and

shareholder resolutions, they often responded by adopting corporate codes of

conduct that addressed working conditions in the factories of their contractors or

subcontractors.46 In 1992, Levi Strauss developed one of the first corporate codes

of conduct to lay out specific labor standards for the company’s contractors.47 By

the mid to late-1990s, statements about working conditions, occupational health

and safety, child labor, and wage levels were common in corporate codes of con-

duct, and a number of major apparel manufacturers and retailers had adopted

codes.48

Yet corporate codes of conduct themselves soon came under contention, as

social movement groups charged that they were merely symbolic documents,

completely detached from realities “on the ground” in factories. Activists

exposed the public relations qualities of codes by showing, for instance, that they

were often not posted in workers’native languages.49 In attempts to “verify” their

codes, companies became more likely to bring outsiders in to inspect or “monitor”

TIM BARTLEY 445

factory conditions. This led to a series of experiments with factory monitoring.

These experiments took several forms, and indeed the character of the monitoring

soon became a subject of intense debate between industry actors and their critics.

Some of the earliest questions about monitoring arose out of campaigns

against child labor in the production of soccer balls in Pakistan and garments in

Bangladesh.50 Conflicts over plans for monitoring factories foreshadowed a num-

ber of debates about the uses of monitoring and meaning of “independent moni-

toring.” While companies’ initial conception of monitoring was to send agents of

the company to inspect contractors’factories, a competing conception arose out of

the National Labor Committee’s campaign against The Gap. Leaders of the Inter-

faith Center on Corporate Responsibility helped broker an agreement between

The Gap and the National Labor Committee, which included a provision for inde-

pendent monitoring of a Salvadoran factory and brought a number of actors

together to consider the meaning and purpose of “independent monitoring.” As a

result of these discussions, in 1995 several Salvadoran religious and human rights

leaders helped to form the Grupo de Monitoreo Independiente de El Salvador to

inspect factories for The Gap.51 This experiment ultimately left both companies

and critics unsatisfied, but nevertheless paved the road for intense debates about

the credibility of monitoring. It is also worth noting that additional independent

monitoring organizations, like Verité and Coverco, were emerging at this point as

well.

Debates about monitoring came to a head in controversies surrounding Nike.

To counter the claims of its critics, the company commissioned monitoring visits

by the accounting firm Ernst & Young (and later Price Waterhouse).52 Yet a review

of a leaked Ernst & Young report on a factory in Vietnam criticized the auditors’

methodology and narrow focus and revealed conclusions like “There’s a high rate

of labor accidents caused by carelessness of employees.”53 Nike also came under

fire for a supposedly “independent” audit it had commissioned in early 1997 by

Andrew Young, a former civil rights activist and UN Ambassador.54 A New

Republic article exposed numerous flaws in Young’s report, including a picture of

Nike employees misrepresenting themselves as trade union representatives.55

In sum, continued social movement pressure—pressure that focused on the

way companies tried to monitor compliance with codes of conduct—raised a

number of questions about the role of monitoring and who should be doing it. In

other words, social movement activity delegitimated companies’ first-choice

solutions, like codes of conduct, marketing campaigns, and internal monitoring—

at least as solutions on their own. This created some underlying demand for a

more credible system for evaluating factory conditions—a demand that seems to

have been shared by at least some members of both the corporate and activist

communities.


Political Action under Neo-Liberalizing Institutions, Part 1:

State Support for Private Regulatory Programs

A second theme found in both cases has to do with political action occurring in

a context of neo-liberal institutional arrangements associated with globalization.

This context shaped the action of states, social movement groups, and NGOs in

such a way as to help shift their efforts and resources to a path toward private

forms of regulation, as opposed to governmental or intergovernmental regulatory

systems. I begin by showing how states came to support private certification ini-

tiatives. Later, I examine the ways in which experiences in international institu-

tional arenas led labor and environmental NGOs to increasingly turn toward pri-

vate solutions, like independent monitoring/certification.

In both fields, private certification systems emerged as state action got directed

toward private forms of regulation, rather than governmental or intergovernmen-

tal systems. This happened, in part, because of states’ interactions with institu-

tions and ideologies of free trade and neo-liberalism. In the forestry case, rules

about free trade severely limited the possibilities for governmental action and

indirectly facilitated the rise of a private alternative. In the case of labor standards,

governmental action gave rise to private certification systems in two main ways—

one through the activities of U.S. government officials and another through the

defeat of a proposal for an intergovernmental certification program.56 Although

government support was crucial to the rise of both forest certification and labor

standards certification, government actors played more direct roles in the latter

case, as will become clear in the discussion of U.S. Department of Labor initiatives.

Tropical Timber Bans and the Impact of Free Trade Rules

In the 1980s and 1990s, a variety of legislative bodies, under pressure from

environmental groups, passed policies intended to slow the rate of tropical defor-

estation. Hundreds of European cities, a few American cities and states, and sev-

eral European countries moved to ban imports of tropical timber in the early

1990s.57 This trend of legislative bans led to a pivotal moment in the regulation of

international forestry.

This came in 1992, when the Austrian parliament voted to ban the import of

tropical timber unless it could be labeled as sustainably produced.58 Tropical tim-

ber exporting countries like Indonesia and Malaysia charged that this amounted to

a nontariff barrier to trade and threatened to challenge the law under the General-

ized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In 1993, the Austrian government

backed down and revised the law.59

This had two very important effects. First, it established that governmental

action on tropical timber imports was vulnerable to challenge under global free

trade rules, thus discouraging other governments from taking this route. As

TIM BARTLEY 447

Crossley argues, “Importing countries have generally taken heed of the pitfalls

encountered by the Austrian approach and moved away from using mandatory,

legislative means to address timber trade issues. It has become clear that they are

likely to be GATT-illegal and subject to challenges under the World Trade Organi-

zation (WTO).”60 Second, when the Austrian government backed away from

requiring labels for tropical timber, it took the money allocated for that project and

funneled it into a private labeling program—the emerging FSC. As one observer

recalls, “WWF-Austria managed to persuade the Austrian government to use that

project money to support FSC. . . . That was a major area of funding [for the FSC]

for certainly the first two years.”61 The Swiss, Dutch, British, and Mexican gov-

ernments also made financial contributions early on, and government aid agencies

have continued to provide some funding.62 So this is a situation in which the inter-

action between state policy and free trade rules helped a private regulatory pro-

gram get off the ground in very concrete ways.

From Governmental to Private Action

on Labor Standards Enforcement

Labor standards certification emerged out of a similar set of dynamics, in

which the state provided material and moral support for private forms of regula-

tion as ways of addressing sweatshops in the United States and abroad. Although

labor standards certification programs focus largely on international labor condi-

tions, some of their origins lay in attempts to enforce U.S. labor law in the Los

Angeles apparel industry. In fact, it was here that the practice of using private

organizations to regularly “monitor” labor conditions in garment factories began.

U.S. Department of Labor officials had struggled to enforce wage and hour

laws in the highly mobile and decentralized garment industry for decades.63 In the

early 1990s, officials in the Wage and Hour division of the Department of Labor

offices in Los Angeles came up with an innovative solution. Under the “Hot

Goods” provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the government could seize

products made in violation of wage and hour laws to keep them out of interstate

commerce. A Labor Department official explains, “We really . . . felt we needed

somebody else helping to monitor what was going on. So we dusted off this 1938

statute of Hot Goods and set up a program where we could use it administratively

instead of only in a legal setting.”64 In an industry that puts a premium on speed to

the market, the seizure of goods, even if only temporarily, could be very damaging.

Yet the Department of Labor’s capacity to inspect factories had diminished

greatly over the previous decades. The ratio of labor inspectors to total U.S. work-

ers went from 1:46,000 in the early 1970s to 1:130,000 in 1992, and continued to

fall during a hiring freeze in the early 1990s.65 Given its diminished enforcement

capacity, the Department of Labor developed a “compliance agreement ” in which

a manufacturer agreed to pay back-wages owed to workers and monitor its con-

tractors’ factories. The first compliance agreement was signed by Guess in 1992.


By mid-1993, about twenty full compliance agreements had been signed in Cali-

fornia, and the program was spreading to New York City.66 A Department of

Labor official described some of the results of the program: “I had Polo Ralph

Lauren giving me a $120,000 check to shut up and get out. You know, I had Calvin

Klein writing a $35,000 check on the spot, [saying] ‘Please do not go to the media

with this.’”67

At first, manufacturers asked quality control personnel to take on labor moni-

toring duties, but soon a new private monitoring industry arose in Los Angeles and

New York City, with monitors sometimes coming from the ranks of former gar-

ment contractors and Department of Labor inspectors.68 The monitoring industry

continued to grow through the mid-1990s, and by 1998, private monitors in south-

ern California were conducting somewhere around 10,000 inspections per year.69

Several of these monitors were later accredited by the Fair Labor Association. So

this is a case of declining state capacity and state support for private programs cre-

ating the organizational foundation for a larger system of private regulation.

In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration got involved, adding experiments

with publicity to this monitoring program, in the view that publicizing the best and

worst companies would have a positive impact on working conditions industry-

wide. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich was particularly active on this, partly in

response to pressure from the garment workers’ union, UNITE! In 1995, Reich

developed a “Trendsetters List,” which used positive publicity to recognize manu-

facturers that were monitoring their contractors. Several companies quickly criti-

cized the list, in part because it lacked any consistent basis for adding or removing

companies, and this primitive proto-certification program was abandoned within

a few years.70 The Department of Labor also used negative publicity strategies, by

publishing the names of manufacturers and retailers using contractors that had

been cited for violations of wage and hour laws.71 As these experiments floun-

dered, Reich pursued two different avenues for using publicity to address sweat-

shop issues—one a private group, the other an existing international organization.

In July 1996, Reich convened the Fashion Industry Forum, a meeting with

apparel manufacturers and retailers. Participants discussed several options,

including company self-monitoring, external monitoring, and the development of

a “no sweat” labeling program.72 Later that year, President Clinton and Secretary

Reich brought together twenty-three representatives of apparel companies, labor

unions, and NGOs, in what would later be called the Apparel Industry Partnership

(AIP). The companies included many that had been on the Trendsetters list as well

as social movement targets such as Nike and Liz Claiborne.73 Representatives

from the AFL-CIO and UNITE! were also present, as were NGOs like the Law-

yers Committee for Human Rights, Business for Social Responsibility, and the

Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. In the early AIP discussions, Reich

had pushed for the group to develop a “no sweat” label for garments, but compa-

nies were sometimes resistant to the idea and there was little movement in this

TIM BARTLEY 449


direction.74 Much of the early work of the AIP was focused on producing a work-

place code of conduct that member companies would agree to.

Also in mid-1996, Reich proposed to the International Labor Organization

(ILO) that it consider developing a system for labeling garments based on the

labor conditions in which they are made. A report in Women’s Wear Daily fore-

shadowed ensuing difficulties, citing concerns about abuses of labeling systems

for political and trade-related purposes.75 The ILO considered a proposal for a

“global social label” the next year.76 This was a modified version of the proposal

made by Reich, although the ILO proposed to certify entire countries rather than

specific companies.77 When the proposal was discussed at the ILO conference in

June of 1997, representatives of developing countries—led by Egypt—attacked

the social labeling proposal as a disguised form of protectionism and charged the

ILO with trying to become a trade organization.78 The social labeling proposal

seems to have died right there. Yet another reform proposal, to make the ILO core

labor standards mandatory for all ILO members, passed the following year.79 So

while one reform effort in the ILO had succeeded, the opportunity for a labeling/

certification systems administered by an existing international organization had

been effectively shut down.

It was in this context that private programs for certifying companies began to

solidify. After the creation of the AIP, two groups had begun creating systems to

monitor factories and certify companies. The Fair Labor Association (FLA) was a

direct extension of the AIP and was officially founded in 1998 as the monitoring

and certification wing of the AIP. Another group, the CEPAA, was also created

just after the formation of the AIP, in part in hopes of carrying out certification for

the AIP80 as well as to standardize other existing social auditing efforts.81

Although this group did not end up working under the AIP, it released its own

Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000) standard for factories and built its own cer-

tification program, later changing its name to Social Accountability International.

The U.S. government provided financial support to both programs. In 1999,

the Clinton administration allocated $4 million a year to supporting NGOs work-

ing on global labor standards issues and set up a grant to be administered by the

U.S. State Department and the Agency for International Development. The FLA

received grants in its early years, receiving close to $650,000 in 2000 and

$750,000 the next year.82 Social Accountability International also received fund-

ing from this grant.83 While companies, foundations, and other organizations also

made financial contributions, the State Department grants make up a majority of

each association’s budget.84

Thus, with international arenas unresponsive to labor standards, the Clinton

administration put substantial energy and resources into creating private alterna-

tives. In some situations, the Clinton administration seems to have shifted to pri-

vate arenas as a response to these institutional arrangements, but this administra-

tion’s actions also helped strengthen neo-liberal agendas. In any case, it was out of

the interaction between states and neo-liberal institutions that private labor stan-

dards certification systems emerged.

In sum, government support played a critical role in the rise of certification of

both forests and factories. Furthermore, it was international institutional arrange-

ments that led governments to put money into private forms of regulation, in part

because these private systems were not subject to rules about “non-tariff barriers

to trade.”

Political Action under Neo-Liberalizing Institutions, Part 2:

NGO Campaigns and the Turn Toward Private Alternatives

In both the labor and environmental cases, experiences in intergovernmental

arenas led NGOs and social movement groups to put more energy into private,

nongovernmental approaches to labor and environmental issues, as they became

increasingly discouraged and disenchanted with governmental and intergovern-

mental approaches. This helps explain how some NGOs became key players in

the development of certification associations.

International Forestry Campaigns and the

Defeat of Governmental Solutions

Environmental groups had several specific experiences with failures and

defeats in intergovernmental arenas. During the 1980s and 1990s, environmental-

ists made a number of attempts to embed forest management standards in existing

international organizations. Yet as several notable campaigns got shut down, envi-

ronmental groups recognized an increasingly dismal set of opportunities for inter-

governmental action and began constructing nongovernmental regulatory

programs.

In the late 1980s, Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom proposed creat-

ing an international forest certification system under the auspices of the Interna-

tional Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), a preexisting international trade

organization, which had governments as members.85 The environmental group

convinced the UK Overseas Development Administration to submit the proposal

to the ITTO at its 1989 meeting. Although it asked only for study of the issue, the

proposal spurred a great deal of controversy and was attacked, particularly by

timber-exporting countries.86 As one Friends of the Earth campaigner said,

We thought that the ITTO could at least—through the project that we proposed—investi-

gate the feasibility of certification. And this might be a way of kind of gently easing into the

ITTO system what was really quite an innovative and potentially quite contentious subject.

And as it turned out, even the consideration of the feasibility of it turned out to be too con-

tentious.87

TIM BARTLEY 451

Timber exporting countries argued that since similar organizations did not

exist for nontropical forests (temperate or boreal), certification would constitute a

trade barrier and would impinge on their sovereignty.88 Discussions about the pro-

posal were mired in North-South conflicts, industry resistance, and questions

about the compatibility of certification with free trade agreements like GATT.89

In the face of this opposition, the UK government weakened the proposal, and

the ITTO agreed to commission a study on the general topic of how market incen-

tives could improve forest management.90 For environmental groups like Friends

of the Earth, this was already a defeat. One participant from the NGO community

went on the record at the 1989 meeting to say that the results of the certification

discussion had “reduced the original Pre-Project Proposal by United Kingdom on

labeling systems to an insignificant study.”91 In the following years, the ITTO con-

tinued to study certification, and even endorsed it, but never again considered

actually administering an inter-governmental certification system.92

The failure of the ITTO to act decisively on the enforcement and verification of

forestry standards fueled the formation of a private certification system. The first

meetings of what was to become the Forest Stewardship Council were occurring

in late 1990, and in a 1991 report, the WWF explicitly framed the emerging FSC

as an alternative to failed intergovernmental programs, referring to “leaving the

ITTO behind.”93 As one FSC employee put it, “FSC was a response to the failure

of international organizations that ought to have had the remit to enforce, to

implement and develop good forestry standards—ITTO in particular. . . . And

FSC was set up to correct that failure.”94

So the ITTO affair is an example of both a “road not taken” in the emergence of

certification and an instance in which environmental groups got an object lesson

of sorts on the politics of free trade and began to frame nongovernmental pro-

grams as alternatives.

Forestry campaigners’frustration with intergovernmental arenas intensified in

the following years, after the 1992 United Nations Commission on Environment

and Development (UNCED) “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Going in to the

meeting, some environmental groups thought the summit had the potential to pro-

duce a binding international agreement on forest management. But the idea of a

global forest convention was crushed in preconference meetings, “initially vetoed

by the Malaysian government but unmourned by many other states,” including

those worried about revenues that would be lost to forest conservation.95 Instead

of producing a binding international convention, the Earth Summit resulted in a

vague set of non-binding guidelines, known as the Forest Principles, as well as an

overall guidance document known as Agenda 21.96

Environmental groups viewed Rio as a nearly complete failure on forestry

issues and began devoting even more of their energies and resources to private

alternatives. One observer explained that environmentalists were especially dis-

appointed because “there were expectations created. People were certainly upset


before. . . . But it reached heightened proportions, unprecedented proportions,

post-Rio—because the expectations were so high.”97

Some environmental groups became especially disenchanted with intergov-

ernmental areas at this point, and seem to have interpreted Rio as one more piece

of evidence that private rather than intergovernmental, initiatives were the place to

focus their energies. This seems especially the case for WWF. One former WWF

official explained that governments had proven too slow and intergovernmental

arenas had proven too easily subject to veto.98 In an influential 1993 report, John-

son and Cabarle reviewed attempts to work through institutions like the ITTO and

UNCED and argued that

these and other emerging “official” international forums are crucial for negotiating,

designing, and enacting the land-use and economic policies needed to make forest manage-

ment more sustainable and to get it practiced on an appreciable scale. However, if past

experiences with international forestry efforts are any guide, these forums will offer little

substantive guidance on how to define and implement more sustainable forest practices

locally. The timber-certification movement is critical to filling that gap.99

After Rio, WWF put a great deal of time and money into an emerging private,

nongovernmental program—the FSC. While the earliest work on the FSC came

from other sources, by the October 1993 founding conference, a number of WWF

representatives were involved, some in key leadership positions.100 Representa-

tives from WWF took a leading role in developing the FSC from a concept into an

organization and contributed significant resources to the project. As one partici-

pant in this process said, “There were a lot of actors that played different roles at

different times. But clearly WWF was front and center for all effective purposes. It

was the incubator and the surrogate mother, so to speak, for the FSC.”101

International Labor Standards Campaigns

and the Obstacles to Government Action

A similar dynamic occurred in the case of labor regulation, after several fail-

ures to get international labor standards embedded in multilateral trade agree-

ments. It was in the wake of these defeats that some labor rights NGOs turned

toward other solutions—like independent monitoring of factories and certifica-

tion programs of various sorts.

In 1994, leaders of the ILRF published an article in Foreign Policy calling for a

“global New Deal.”102 While the increased scope of capital certainly made the

establishment of a global welfare state an uphill battle, the ILRF and others saw

some possibilities for embedding social standards in multilateral trade agree-

ments that were being negotiated at the time. Within the next two years, however,

this potential would be blocked repeatedly, leaving reformers frustrated.

As the Uruguay round of negotiations of GATT approached in 1994, labor

activists redoubled efforts to add a “social clause” to GATT, to be enforced by its

TIM BARTLEY 453

new administrative branch, the World Trade Organization.103 The focus was on the

ILO’s core labor standards rather than wage standards, in order to avoid the stron-

gest charges of protectionism.104 Even so, GATT negotiators rebuffed this cam-

paign at the Uruguay meetings of 1994 and refused to even recognize a legitimate

link between international trade and labor standards.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was also being negoti-

ated during this period. Although U.S. President Bill Clinton had promised not to

sign NAFTA unless it included labor and environmental protections, he ended up

signing the agreement with only weak labor “side agreements,” the North Ameri-

can Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC). The NAALC formally covers a

range of labor rights, but it does not protect all rights equally. Freedom of associa-

tion, for instance, is considered a lower tier standard, in effect making the pro-

cess of filing a complaint and getting a decision even lengthier than for other

standards.105

So by the mid-1990s, labor groups had experienced several notable failures in

intergovernmental arenas and were becoming increasingly discouraged about the

prospects for effective governmental action.106 As one labor rights professional

explained, “I would say that it’s taken for granted that, as of 1996—or even

2002—government action is not forthcoming. I don’t take it for granted that gov-

ernment action is not possible, I just think . . . it’s not gonna happen.” Another sug-

gested that given the failure of unionization and law enforcement, “It seemed like

we needed to add consumer pressure to legal, diplomatic, and trade pressures.

And so it became not a choice of either this or that, but an additional weapon in the

arsenal for human rights.”107

In this context, a group like the ILRF, which had been at the center of these

campaigns, began focusing more on private strategies—like independent moni-

toring of factories and nongovernmental certification programs. The National

Labor Committee, while not a supporter of certification, championed the use of

“independent monitoring” of factories—a precursor of sorts to certification sys-

tems.108 The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which had been at the

center of experiments with independent monitoring, also contributed to building a

larger certification program. This is not to say that public and private programs

were seen as mutually exclusive, but groups now poured significant resources into

creating and supporting nongovernmental regulatory tools, like independent

monitoring and certification. Labor rights groups continued to campaign for labor

standards and a “social clause” in the WTO, but this proposal was again defeated

at the Singapore meeting of the WTO in late 1996 and early 1997.109

Thus, in the cases of both labor and the environment, as NGOs and social

movement organizations experienced failures in intergovernmental arenas—are-

nas in which neo-liberal free trade agendas were becoming dominant and social

and environmental standards were increasingly seen as barriers to trade—they

tended to shift their energies and resources toward private alternatives. Some


groups even became the “institutional entrepreneurs” for certification, forging

fragile coalitions with companies to construct new associations and to standardize

practices of monitoring, social/environmental auditing, and certification.

Points of Comparison in the Emergence of

Forest and Labor Standards Certification

Certification of both forests and factories emerged through a politically con-

tested process, in which activists, governments, and companies pursued number

of different strategies, and a number failed or were defeated. By charting these

options, my analysis has helped draw out the process by which a new regulatory

form emerged, rather than seeing it as inevitable or automatic. Interestingly, the

failure or defeat of some strategies (like intergovernmental regulation) helped

facilitate the rise of private certification.

Specifically, in both cases, certification systems were in part a response to

social movement pressures, which created a demand for some way of evaluating

companies’ claims about their social and environmental impacts. At times, both

companies and their critics called for higher level, standardized programs to do

something like certification, although they usually disagreed about how such pro-

grams should work.

But the emergence of certification associations was conditioned by a series of

conflicts that resulted in both states and NGOs channeling resources into a private

form of regulation. First, as governmental and intergovernmental options for

addressing labor and environmental issues were blocked or failed, NGOs and

social movement groups put more energy and resources into nongovernmental

programs—like nascent certification and monitoring efforts. In addition, as direct

state involvement became illegitimate or prohibited, states shifted to private solu-

tions—and funded certification systems at crucial early moments. Sometimes

government actors even helped organize private certification associations. This

all occurred in a context in which governmental and intergovernmental programs

were stifled by neo-liberal ideologies and institutions, which, at the least, tended

to legitimate claims that social and environmental standards were little more than

barriers to trade, and sometimes constrained action directly. Yet out of the failure

of governmental and intergovernmental programs grew the material and rhetori-

cal resources for the construction of private alternatives.

These similarities in the development of certification associations in the

apparel and forest products fields go a long way in explaining the rise of certifica-

tion as a regulatory form. But it is also instructive to consider a few differences

between the cases. First, governments played different roles in supporting certifi-

cation initiatives in these two cases. In one case, Clinton administration officials

were directly involved in setting up the meetings that led to the Apparel Industry

Partnership, and then creating a grant that could fund this type of initiative. Gov-

TIM BARTLEY 455

ernment support for forest certification was generally less direct and took the form

of funding rather than personal leadership.

Second, although the construction of both types of certification systems was a

conflictual process, the environmental social movement field tended to be more

cohesive than the field of labor and human rights groups. For instance, there were

serious debates between groups that supported tropical timber boycotts, like

Friends of the Earth and the Rainforest Action Network, and more mainstream

environmental groups that opposed boycotts, like WWF; nevertheless, the former

groups sometimes used boycotts in ways that served to increase participation in

the timber certification partnerships led by WWF—a tacit alliance of sorts

between different segments of the environmental community.110 By contrast,

intense frictions between organized labor, some labor rights groups, and main-

stream human rights organizations dominated the early days of labor standards

certification, especially once labor unions dropped out of the emerging FLA in

protest of its lax standards and procedures. Furthermore, because of the

“mainstreaming” of environmental concerns and the creation of “environmental

management” positions and consultants in the corporate sector, actors working on

forest certification have been more likely to move between the business and NGO

sectors than have actors working on labor standards certification. So while both

labor and environmental social movement groups used similar tactics of targeting

companies, the two movements differed in other ways—some of which may be

consequential for the future of certification.

Third, although both forms of certification arose in the 1990s, forest certifica-

tion did begin somewhat earlier than labor standards certification. Because of this,

it is conceivable that the institutional entrepreneurs on the labor side may have

drawn on or copied from forest certification as a model for their own work. Yet my

interviews indicate that channels of communication between these two groups

were almost completely absent. Many key players in building either forest certifi-

cation or labor standards certification knew very little about the other case of cer-

tification, and some indicated they would like to learn more from me about how

other attempts at certification have worked.111 So although there is a difference in

timing, it is unlikely that this greatly affected the process by which private regula-

tory programs emerged.

CONCLUSION

Why did the same regulatory form emerge in two otherwise quite different

fields in the 1990s? The answer is that the fields experienced roughly similar

dynamics of controversy, conflict, and innovation, resulting from a particular type

of social movement strategy and a neo-liberal institutional context. Social move-

ment campaigns that targeted companies for their labor or forestry practices led to

spiraling debates about the credibility of corporate claims to social and environ-

mental responsibility. A neo-liberal institutional context encouraged states and


NGOs to build private regulatory associations, by limiting opportunities for gov-

ernmental and intergovernmental regulation. In this context, states offered sup-

port for private regulatory initiatives, sometimes after being constrained in

attempts to develop governmental or intergovernmental solutions. Ironically,

then, public agencies are in large part responsible for the rise of private regulation.

NGOs also played crucial roles in building the first certification initiatives in each

field. Yet they did so primarily after they had experienced repeated defeats and

failures in intergovernmental arenas, particularly as the governmental action on

environmental and/or labor standards they had been campaigning for became

increasingly defined as “non-tariff barriers to trade.” To be clear, it is a neo-liberal

institutional context that explains why certification has emerged in the form of

private rather than governmental or intergovernmental systems. The battles about

claims-making and credibility discussed above could have been addressed

through public institutions, had international institutional arrangements not dis-

couraged this outcome.

My analysis has identified two types of mechanisms driving the rise of private

regulation—one about social movements, the other about free trade rules and

regimes. In addition, the analysis has shed light on the process by which certifica-

tion associations emerged, by looking carefully at how strategies unfolded over

time and the ways in which specific events helped mobilize moral and material

support for certification. While I have focused on explaining the apparel and for-

est products cases, the analysis has uncovered a story that is potentially

generalizable to other settings, given several conditions. If social movement pres-

sure exists and is directed at companies that place value on their brand reputations,

and if commodity chains in the industry are heavily international in scope, then I

would expect processes in these fields to look similar to the apparel and forest

products fields. Specifically, I would expect social movement campaigns and

industry responses to generate demand for some overarching system to evaluate

company claims. When international trade is involved, then institutional arrange-

ments for securing free trade will mitigate against governments doing this

directly, and we are more likely to see governments and other interested parties

supporting private certification associations. On the other hand, certification can

be carried out through governmental means, where intranational trade is more

prominent.112 As the research literature in this area advances and expands, addi-

tional research will be able to see if these mechanisms help explain the conditions

under which private certification associations are likely to materialize.

More broadly, what can the cases analyzed here contribute to our understand-

ing of how new regulatory forms and institutional arrangements emerge? First,

my analysis points to the intersection of globalization and institutional emergence

as an important area for theoretical elaboration. Over the past century, social sci-

entists have shown quite decisively that institutions matter—that is, that market

activity is embedded in and depends on particular institutional arrangements.113

TIM BARTLEY 457

But our theories of institutional emergence and change often assume a context in

which production networks are primarily national in scope, firms are clearly

bounded, and nation-states stand as the ultimate arbiter of rights and rules. These

baseline conditions seem to be changing. Scholars from a variety of camps have

argued that globalization disrupts existing institutions, alters the power of states,

and gives rise to new forms of governance.114 In addition to the effects of hyper-

mobile capital, capitalist globalization has also meant the rise of institutions for

defining and securing “free trade.”115 As my analysis illustrates, these institutions

of globalization can have far-reaching implications for other institution-building

projects.

Finally, this study tells a story about what can happen when social movements’

“corporate campaign” strategies collide with corporations’“branding” strategies.

As I have shown, once social movements attack companies and companies

respond with claims about their social/environmental friendliness, the movement-

company interaction tends to take on the character of a spiraling debate over the

credibility of claims on both sides. An interesting sort of politics of legitimacy and

information ensues, along with pressures for institutions that can generate credi-

bility and impersonal trust.116 This dynamic is especially likely to take hold when

companies have invested in creating brand images that are cognitively and emo-

tionally significant in the minds of consumers and investors—and thus worth

defending in the media and public arena. As social movements increasingly target

companies—rather than or in addition to governments—and brands become sites

of cultural and political struggle,117 it may add a new layer to the politics of regula-

tion in the twenty-first century.

NOTES

1. Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite, Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Dereg-

ulation Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Neil Gunningham and Peter

Graobosky, with Darren Sinclair, Smart Regulation: Designing Environmental Policy

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); and Sol and Picciotto and Ruth Mayne, eds., Regulating

International Business: Beyond Liberalization (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).

2. This is based on a count of articles that mention “certification,” “monitoring,” or a

specific organization engaging in these activities (e.g., mention of the Forest Stewardship

Council or of Nike hiring external auditors).

3. Although similar processes have occurred in Europe, this study is restricted to pro-

grams operating in North America.

4. Jason McNichol, “Contesting Governance in the Global Marketplace: A Sociolog-

ical Assessment of British Efforts to Build Markets for NGO-Certified Wood Products”

(Berkeley: Center for Culture, Organization, and Politics, University of California, 2000).

5. Jill Esbenshade, The Social Accountability Contract: Private Monitoring and

Labor Relations in the Global Apparel Industry (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,

Berkeley, 1999); Dara O’Rourke, “Outsourcing Regulation: Analyzing Non-Governmental

Systems of Labor Standards and Monitoring,” Policy Studies Journal (forthcoming, 2003);

Charles Sabel, Dara O’Rourke, and Archon Fung, “Ratcheting Labor Standards: Regula-

tion for Continuous Improvement in the Global Workplace” (unpublished paper, 2001);


Nina Ascoly, Joris Oldenziel, and Ineke Zeldenrust, “Overview of Recent Developments

on Monitoring and Verification in the Garment and Sportswear Industry in Europe”

(unpublished manuscript, SOMO, Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations.

2001); Jason McNichol, “The Forest Stewardship Council as a New Para-Regulatory

Social Form,” in E. Meidinger, G. Elliot, and G. Oesten, eds., The Social and Political

Dimensions of Forest Certification (Remagen-Oberwinter, Germany: Forstbuch, 2002);

McNichol, “Contesting Governance in the Global Marketplace; Benjamin Cashore, “Non-

State Global Governance: Is Forest Certification a Legitimate Alternative to a Global For-

est Convention,” (unpublished paper, Yale University, 2002); and Kristiina A. Vogt, Bruce

C. Larson, John C. Gordon, Daniel J. Vogt, and Anna Fanzeres, Forest Certification: Roots,

Issues, Challenges, and Benefits (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000).

6. Gary Gereffi, Ronie Garcia-Johnson, and Erika Sasser, “The NGO-Industrial

Complex” Foreign Policy (July/August 2001); and Virginia Haufler, A Public Role for the

Private Sector: Industry Self-Regulation in a Global Economy (Washington, DC: Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, 2001).

7. Gereffi et al., “The NGO-Industrial Complex.”

8. Interview no. 26.


10. Elisabeth Clemens and James Cook, “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining

Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441-66; and Robert Bates,

Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, Jean Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast, eds., Analytic

Narratives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

11. Neil Fligstein, “Markets as Politics: A Political-Cultural Approach to Market

Institutions,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 656-73; Paul DiMaggio, “Con-

structing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art Museums, 1920-

1940,” in W.W. Powell and P. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational

Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Hayagreeva Rao, “Caveat

Emptor: The Construction of Nonprofit Consumer Watchdog Organizations,” American

Journal of Sociology 103 (1998): 912-61.

12. Michael Hechter, “The Emergence of Cooperative Social Institutions,” in M.

Hechter, K.D. Opp, and R. Wippler, eds., Social Institutions: Their Emergence, Mainte-

nance and Effects (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the

Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1990).

13. Rao, “Caveat Emptor”; and Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, Organizational

Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

14. Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free

Press, 1985).

15. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutional Organizations: Formal Structure

as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 80 (1977): 340-63; and David

John Frank, Ann Hironaka, and Evan Schofer, “The Nation State and the Natural Environ-

ment, 1900-1995,” American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 96-116.

16. Gisele De Meur and Dirk Berg-Schlosser, “Comparing Political Systems: Estab-

lishing Similarities and Dissimilarities,” European Journal of Political Research 26

(1994): 193-219.

17. Charles Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2000).

18. As Stone argues, labor issues differ from environmental ones in that the main polit-

ical challengers (labor) depend on capital in a way that environmentalists do not. See Kath-

erine Stone, “Labour in the Global Economy: Four Approaches to Transnational Labour

TIM BARTLEY 459

Regulation,” in W. Bratton, J. McCahery, S. Picciotto, and C. Scott, eds., International

Regulatory Competition and Coordination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 445-77. In addi-

tion, the benefits of environmental regulation are typically much more dispersed than the

benefits of labor regulation. For more on the implications of this, see James Q. Wilson,

“The Politics of Regulation” in J. Q. Wilson, ed., The Politics of Regulation (New York:

Basic Books, 1980).

19. John R. Bowman, Capitalist Collective Action: Competition, Cooperation, and

Conflict in the Coal Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and George

Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Manage-

ment Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3-21.

20. Sabel et al., “Ratcheting Labor Standards”; Esbenshade, “The Social Accountabil-

ity Contract”; Cashore, “Non-State Global Governance”; and McNichol, “The Forest

Stewardship Council.”

21. S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian

Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of

London 205B (1979): 581-98; and Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of

American Industrial Order, 1965-1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

22. Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of

Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

23. While much of the critical discourse surrounding these initiatives has focused on

corporate dominance of certification and monitoring, it is striking how few companies

were involved in the early development of these programs. In fact, mass industry involve-

ment did not occur until later, as industry associations founded competing, weaker bodies.

This by no means invalidates the corporate dominance critique, but reminds us that corpo-

rations were mainly late adopters rather than innovators.

24. Interview nos. 22, 29, 31.


26. See Cashore, “Non-State Global Governance,” and McNichol, “The Forest Stew-

ardship Council,” on the legitimation and marketing of forest certification.


28. Deborah Leipziger, SA8000: The Definitive Guide to the New Social Standard

(London: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2001); and interview nos. 9, 13, 30.

29. For more on these debates, see Archon Fung, Dara O’Rourke, and Charles Sabel,

“Realizing Labor Standards,” Boston Review (February/March 2001) and the responses to

this article.

30. These were coded using the Lexis-Nexus database and included alternate forms of

the words (i.e., “rain forest” in addition to “rainforest”).


32. Interview nos. 15, 16.

33. Christopher Upton and Stephen Bass, The Forest Certification Handbook (Delray

Beach, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1996), 139.

34. Ibid., 139. Notice that both of these claims used the term sustained yield rather than

just sustainable or sustainable development. Forest products producers have been appro-

priating sustainability rhetoric into rationales for increased production since the 1930s, and

the term sustainability remains one of the most open and contested terms in environmental

discourse.

35. World Wildlife Fund, Truth or Trickery: Timber Labelling Past and Future (Lon-

don: World Wildlife Fund, UK, 1994), 7. This report included results from a 1992 follow up

study that still found a number of empty claims like “timber from managed forests,” “sus-

tained yield,” and “for each tree felled, more are planted.”


36. Simon Counsell, “Briefing: Timber: Eco-Labelling and Certification,” (Friends of

the Earth, www.foe.co.uk, 1995), 1.



39. Nels Johnson and Bruce Cabarle, Surviving the Cut: Natural Forest Management

in the Humid Tropics (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1993).

40. Counsell, “Briefing: Timber: Eco-Labelling and Certification”; Richard Donovan,

“Role of NGOs,” in Viana et al., eds., Certification of Forest Products (Washington, DC:

Island Press, 1996), 93-110.


42. Chris Maser and Walter Smith, Forest Certification in Sustainable Development:

Healing the Landscape (Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 2001).

43. Jason McNichol, “The Forest Stewardship Council,” and “Contesting

Governance.”

44. Michael B. Jenkins and Emily T. Smith, The Business of Sustainable Forestry

(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). See McNichol, “Contesting Governance,” for more

on how loosely coordinated protests against retailers and the resulting buyers groups

helped build a market for certified wood.

45. Pamela Varley, ed., The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the

Global Frontier (Washington, DC: Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1998), 8.

46. Companies had been creating corporate ethics codes since the 1980s, but these

tended to focus on internal ethical issues rather than setting standards for suppliers or

including provisions about labor conditions. See Ronald E. Berenbeim, Corporate Ethics,

Research report no. 900 (New York: The Conference Board, 1987).

47. John McCormick and Marc Levinson, “The Supply Police,” Newsweek 121 no. 7

(1993): 48.

48. Janelle Diller, “A Social Conscience in the Global Marketplace? Labour Dimen-

sions of Codes of Conduct, Social Labeling and Investor Initiatives,” International Labor

Review 138, no. 2 (1999); International Labor Organization, “Overview of Global Devel-

opments and Office Activities Concerning Codes of Conduct, Social Labeling and Other

Private Sector Initiatives Addressing Labour Issues” (www.ilo.org, 1998); Varley, The

Sweatshop Quandary; and U.S. Department of Labor, The Apparel Industry and Codes of

Conduct: A Solution to the International Child Labor Problem? (Washington, DC: U.S.

Department of Labor, Bureau of International Affairs, 1996).

49. Bob Jeffcott and Lynda Yanz, “Voluntary Codes of Conduct: Do They Strengthen

or Undermine Government Regulation and Worker Organizing?” (unpublished paper,

Maquila Solidarity Network). For more on the symbolic versus material consequences of

codes, see Steve Frenkel, “Globalization, Athletic Footwear Commodity Chains and

Employment Relations in China,” Organization Studies 22, no. 4 (2001): 531-62.

50. M. Burns, M. Forstater, D. Osgood, A. Mong, and S. Zadek, Open Trading:

Options for Effective Monitoring of Corporate Codes (London: New Economics Founda-

tion/Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1997); Varley, The Sweatshop Quan-

dary; and interview no. 33.

51. Bonacich and Appelbaum, Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles

Apparel Industry, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 306-7; and Independ-

ent Monitoring Working Group, “IMWG Summary Draft” (unpublished report, 2002).

This organization has recently been accredited as a monitor for the Fair Labor Association.

52. Interview no. 9; Dara O’Rourke, “Smoke from a Hired Gun: A Critique of Nike’s

Labor and Environmental Auditing in Vietnam as Performed by Ernst & Young” (Transna-

tional Resource and Action Center, 1997).

TIM BARTLEY 461

53. O’Rourke, “Smoke from a Hired Gun,” 6-7.

54. Randy Shaw, Reclaiming America: Nike, Clean Air, and the New National Activ-

ism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Campaign for Labor Rights,

“Newsletter #9” (September-November 1997).

55. Shaw, Reclaiming America; and Campaign for Labor Rights, “Newsletter #9.”

56. Although government support was crucial to the rise of both forest certification

and labor standards certification, government actors played more direct roles in the latter

case, with the U.S. Department of Labor providing much of the original impetus for the for-

mation of the Apparel Industry Partnership and Fair Labor Association.

57. Johnson and Cabarle, Surviving the Cut; Conrad B. MacKerron and Douglas G.

Cogan, Business in the Rainforests: Corporations, Deforestation and Sustainability

(Washington, DC: Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1993).

58. Vogt et al., Forest Certification; Crossley, “A Review of Global Forest Manage-

ment”; Dudley et al., Bad Harvest?; Christopher Elliott, Forest Certification From a Policy

Network Perspective (Jakarta, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research,

2000).

59. Interview #18; Elliott, Forest Certification from a Policy Network Perspective.

60. Crossley, “A Review of Global Forest Management.”



63. Bonacich and Appelbaum, Behind the Label.


65. Robert Ross, “Sweatshop Police,” The Nation (9 September 2001); Frederick

Abernathy, John Dunlop, Janice Hammond, and David Weil, A Stitch in Time: Lean

Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing: Lessons from the Apparel and Textile

Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and interviews nos. 32, 10.

66. Interview no. 14; Bonacich and Appelbaum, Behind the Label.



69. Esbenshade, The Social Accountability Contract.

70. Stanley Levy, Testimony, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education

and the Workforce, American Worker at a Crossroads Project (8 May 1998); Bonacich and

Appelbaum, Behind the Label; and interview no. 5.

71. Joanna Ramey, “10 Makers, Retailers Sign on for Clinton’s Anti-Sweatshop

Panel,” WWD (5 August 1996), 1-2; Bonacich and Appelbaum, Behind the Label.

72. Susan S. Black, “Ante Up.” Bobbin (September 1996), 2.

73. Esbenshade, The Social Accountability Contract.

74. Joanna Ramey “U.S. Officials Plan to Inspect Foreign Factories’Practices,” WWD

(3 September 1996), 2.

75. John Zaracostas, “Reich: Make Labeling a Worldwide Plan,” WWD (13 June

1996), 13.

76. Varley, The Sweatshop Quandary, 38; Haufler, A Public Role for the Private

Sector.

77. Joanna Ramey, “ILO Head Calls for Label: Sweatshop-Free Countries,” WWD (15

May 1997), 18.

78. John Zaracostas, “White House Insists on Efforts for Global Standards of Labor,”

WWD (13 June 1997), 18; and Varley, The Sweatshop Quandary.

79. Haufler, A Public Role for the Private Sector.





83. Interview 12.


85. Rachel Crossley, “A Review of Global Forest Management Certification Initia-

tives: Political and Institutional Aspects” (paper for the conference on Econonomic, Social

and Political Issues in Certification of Forest Management, May 1996, Malaysia, UBC-

UPM).

86. Fred P. Gale, The Tropical Timber Trade Regime (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998);

Counsell, “Briefing: Timber: Eco-Labelling and Certification”; Vogt et al., Forest Certifi-

cation; Elliott, Forest Certification from a Policy Network Perspective; and Steven John-

son, “ITTO’s Role in Building the Foundations for Assessing and Certifying Sustainable

Tropical Forest Management” (www.pfnq.com.au, 2000).


88. Gale, The Tropical Timber Trade Regime. As Gale points out, while timber export-

ing countries were the most vehement critics, representatives from North American and

European governments may have been willing accomplices in the derailment of the certifi-

cation proposal.

89. Ibid.

90. Elliott, Forest Certification From a Policy Network Perspective; and Gale, The

Tropical Timber Trade Regime.

91. International Tropical Timber Organization, “Report of the International Tropical

Timber Council, 7th session, Yokohama, 30 October–7 November 1989” (Yokohama,

Japan, 1989), 25.

92. In 1993, a report commissioned by the ITTO recommended country-level certifi-

cation as a more workable alternative to product or forest certification (see Johnson,

“ITTO’s Role”). Another report followed in 1994, which took a somewhat more optimistic

view of forest certification.

93. Elliott, Forest Certification from a Policy Network Perspective, 48.


95. Nigel Dudley, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, and Francis Sullivan, Bad Harvest? The Tim-

ber Trade and the Degradation of the World’s Forests (London: Earthscan, 1999), 119; and

Upton and Bass, The Forest Certification Handbook, 124.

96. Dudley et al., Bad Harvest; and Upton and Bass, The Forest Certification

Handbook.


98. Ibid.

99. Johnson and Cabarle, Surviving the Cut, 51.

100. “List of Participants,” FSC conference, Toronto, 1992; and interview no. 18.


102. Terry Collingsworth, J. William Goold, and Pharis Harvey, “Time for a Global

New Deal,” Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1 (1994): 8-13.

103. Ibid.

104. John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation (New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2000), 235.

105. George Tsogas, Labor Regulation in a Global Economy (Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 2001); Human Rights Watch, “Trading Away Rights: The Unfulfilled Promise of

NAFTA’s Labor Side Agreement,” (www.hrw.org/reports/2001/nafta, 2001); and inter-

view no. 30.

106. Labor unions and labor rights groups in the U.S. were also seeing another tool get

taken away at this point—the Generalized System of Preferences program. Under this

TIM BARTLEY 463

trade preference program, labor groups could petition for reviews of countries’ eligibility

for preferential trade status, based on their labor conditions. It was an imperfect tool, but

provided at least a limited amount of leverage for addressing international labor conditions.

See Tsogas, Labor Regulation in a Global Economy; and interview no. 30.


108. Kitty Krupat, “From War Zone to Free Trade Zone: A History of the National

Labor Committee,” in Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of

Garment Workers (New York: Verso, 1997), 51-77; and Charles Kernaghan, “An Open Let-

ter to the Students.”

109. Interview no. 10; and Varley, The Sweatshop Quandary.

110. McNichol, “Contesting Governance.”

111. I also used the pattern of referrals generated by my interviews to map a network of

connections among key players (available from the author upon request). This map shows a

striking, unbridged gap between individuals working on forest certification and those

working on labor standards certification, which suggests that the two programs developed

separately, not as a result of simple diffusion from one field to another.

112. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recently finalized standards for organic

agricultural products are an example of a governmental certification process, which only

apply to producers outside the United States on a voluntary basis. See Mrill Ingram and

Helen Ingram, “Creating Credible Edibles: The Alternative Agriculture Movement and

Passage of U.S. Federal Organic Standards,” in D. Meyer, V. Jenness, and H. Ingram, eds.,

Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy (forthcoming).

113. Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Roth and Wittich (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1978); Randall Collins, “Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism: A

Systematization,” American Sociological Review 45 (1980): 925-42; Fligstein, “Markets

as Politics”; and W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage, 1995).

114. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Philip G. Cerny, “Globalization and the

Changing Logic of Collective Action,” International Organization 49, no. 4 (1995): 595-

625; and Kenichi Omae, The Borderless World (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

115. Peter Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Glob-

alization,” World Politics 50 (1997): 62-87.

116. Susan Shapiro, “The Social Control of Impersonal Trust,” American Journal of

Sociology 93 (1987): 623-58. Shapiro talks about this process as the elaboration of higher-

order “guardians of trust.” Interestingly, to the extent that state agencies are becoming lim-

ited in their ability to serve this guardian role, we should expect to see an acceleration of

this process, and the emergence of multiple layers of institutions that attempt to secure trust

or credibility in some form.

117. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador,

1999).

Tim Bartley is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana Uni-

versity, where he is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Institutions, Popu-

lation, and Environmental Change. He recently completed his Ph.D. at the Univer-

sity of Arizona. He is an organizational and political sociologist, currently doing

research on the rise of new regulatory forms and the construction of fields of private

regulation in a context of globalization. His previous work has appeared in the

American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Perspectives, and The World-Systems

Reader.


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