Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Keynote lecture for the workshop The political economy of latecoming in the digital era: The case of rising standards powers. Moderated by Dr. Daniel Fuchs (HU Berlin).
 

More than any other country India epitomizes the extent to which the internationalisation of services goes hand in hand with the rise of the digital economy. Most studies portraying the success story of business process outsourcing in India and their prominence worldwide convey a State/market divide. The presentation contends that the picture would be incomplete without taking account of standards. Moreover, it reconsiders conventional accounts that relational and intangible services are hard to standardise and, hence, internationalise. The Indian office of the world codifies and disaggregates all sorts of tasks into discrete processes likely to be assessed against distinct quality and security standards. The presentation conceives such standards as reflecting broader forms of transnational hybrid authority. Such authority is not thoroughly private, let alone exclusively public; it includes major socio-political concerns behind a veil of technical specifications; and its exposure to global market forces intermingles with domestic incentive policies. 
 

Bio:

Jean-Christophe Graz is Professor of international relations at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, co-founder of the Centre of International History and Political Studies of Globalization (CRHIM), and currently Visiting Professor at the Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, as Mercator Fellow of the DFG Research Training Group ‘Standards of Governance’. He has worked for over twenty years on regulation issues in global political economy. His research focuses on transnational private governance, international standards, service offshoring, and more recently on labour and sustainability standards, risk and uncertainty, platform capitalism, and digital traceability in global supply chains. His book The Power of Standards: Hybrid authority and the Globalisation of Services (Cambridge University Press, 2019 – Open Access) received the Joan Robinson Prize for the best monograph from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE).