85. For additional information on the withdrawal of state responsibility see: Smith, J. Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Private Authority in Network Society
Introduction
There is broad consensus in the literature that private actors are playing a more important role in international politics than ever before.1,2,3,4,5,6,7 Beyond merely being able to influence decision makers and rule makers, they are actually becoming rule makers themselves. However, there is little systematic and explanatory knowledge describing how they have been able to make that transition. This transition is one where private governors have moved into subject positions wherein they can make and enforce rules. Perhaps even less has been said on why some private actors, once in these positions, have become more widely accepted than other competing private actors. The understanding of these two processes, taken together, can present a much broader and significant understanding of private authority.
A brief overview of the process by which this book argues that private authority is generated is as follows: Private governors must first cultivate a discourse that places them in a subject position from where their exercising of private authority becomes possible, as a private actor wielding authority is something that does not materialize from structural or material conditions. Rather, it is something that originates as an idea that is then manifested through discourse. Discourse shapes the possibilities for acting within the world, for both the private actors and the political actors that surround them alike. A constitutive part of this process is meaning-making, and leveraging discourses to make sense of a dynamic, social world. Through this meaning-making process, the identities of those actors engaged in the discourse adapt to the emergent world around them. This is a critically important part of private authority that must be included as part of its narrative. For it is through this process that materially weak actors can regulate the behavior of the more powerful. In constructing nodal points around which other actors converge, weak actors give meaning to the actions of those acting around them. So, for example, if a private environmental governor constructs, or defines, what it means to be acting sustainably, then actors seeking to be perceived as acting sustainably must adjust their behavior accordingly. The private actor creates an implicit rule structure that others must follow to be considered to be acting sustainably—as acting sustainably is merely the manifestation of an idea that is being enacted by way of a set of constructed social practices. This manifestation is, again, not due to any material or structural condition external to the social relationship; rather, it is due to the social process by which meaning was made.
This book seeks to explain this process in two ways. First, by looking at the emergence of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), within their respective sectors (forests and fisheries), to show how they were able to strategically shape the discourse within these sectors and, in doing so, place themselves in subject positions from where they were legitimated as authorities. Second, by looking at how, from these positions, they expanded their base of authority by constructing sets of articulating practices that other actors then abided by. Cumulatively, through these discursive maneuverings, the FSC and the MSC, acting as network connectors, were able to force other actors to abide by their rules because doing so was intimately related to identity formation.
Part One: Framing the Argument within the Appropriate Macro Context
Social processes are co-constituted with the structural features within which they are embedded—thus framing them appropriately is critical. While the aforementioned approaches to private authority have been framed within the context of dyadic relationships, taking place within hierarchically structured political sectors, I argue that this frame no longer tells a sufficient part of the story, and thus an expanded understanding is necessary. The world is undergoing a rapid growth of decentralized forms of governance, based on networks and networking logics. This growth has opened up opportunity structures wherein actors can seek to exercise private authority. That is not to say that states are losing power (nor sovereignty) to non-state actors seeking to challenge them. Rather, it is to say that the technological advancements that developed symbiotically with the spread of capitalism have led to some fundamental changes of the global political system. One such change has been the increasing prominence of information as a source of power in relation to control over resources and material commodities. Whereas all three have always historically been sources of power, and remain so, they are weighted differently in the contemporary era (i.e., information is becoming a more important source of power relative to possession of material resources). This development, considered in parallel with the increasing capacity of non-state actors to generate, aggregate, and use information as a source of power, means that non-state actors are now better equipped to wield authority in select political sectors than ever before.
Another such change brought about by the proliferation of global capitalism is the breaking down of communication barriers, which, among various other factors, has imbued political behavior with an economic logic (based on efficiencies and instrumental utility).8 Under such conditions hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations have become less capable of resolving the issues they face due to the rigidity of their structures. Rigidity prevents an organization from efficiently managing and acting upon large sets of complex information. In response, organizations across the globe are moving toward greater decentralization. Under these increasingly decentralized forms, in an increasingly information-centric world, power and authority are becoming more distributed—and shared—for the sake of greater efficiency and effectiveness in achieving objectives. The political logic generated by this transition has come to challenge that of the old bureaucratic state-centric model, thus problematizing the state-centric frameworks that most contemporary work analyzing governance, power, and authority rely on. Such approaches give little consideration to the social dynamics of the current historical period through which governance takes place, which is that of networks.9 Therefore, to better understand any political sector of society today, this book argues that a contextualization and consideration of network logics is critical.
Network society—the moniker used by Manuel Castells (1996)—consists of networked social actors facilitating the flow of information, and by extension social forms of power, within and across networks. As the process of power transference here is as much about social connectivity as it is about any particular material status, it is important (in understanding and explaining the logics and processes within network society) to consider the role played by social positioning and identity. However, as social positioning and identity formation are dynamic processes that occur over time, and are socially constructed, any effort to explain them must consider their emergence. Or, better stated, the process by which private actors emerged into subject positions from where they could wield private authority must be considered. Once this process is adequately presented it should become clearer how these actors were able to arrive at these subject positions from where they could wield authority, as well as how they were able to garner and expand that authority once in that position.
Before moving forward, it is important to note that there does exist a healthy amount of literature in the field of international relations that uses social network analysis to explain a diverse array of political outcomes.10 More particularly, existing literature explains either how social positioning within a network determines certain constraints and opportunities, and the effects this has on performance, behavior, and/or beliefs, or how outcomes are explained by the structure of connections within the network. The tendency in these studies, however, is to treat networks independently, either as structures or as actors.11 As structures, networks are seen as interconnected nodes that influence the behavior of their members and produce consequential outcomes.12 As actors, they are seen as consciously designed organizations with clear membership