Why Hybrids Now?

Why are standards so often defined as an archetypical example of hybrid regulation? Does this refer only to the technical complexity involved in the all-pervasive use of such market and regulatory instruments whilst seeking global solutions to global problems? Is it a rough-and-ready recognition of private actors as invaluable stakeholders above and beyond states in standard-setting procedures? According to current usage, it could be both, either, or neither of the above. In fact, the concept of hybridity is rarely applied with any precision. In practice, it is generally employed to serve as a handy default attribute of the power of standards in global governance, part of a lexical register chosen to accommodate the multiple and contradictory understandings of their authority at the global level. After briefly reviewing how the notion of hybridity is used as a sort of “second-best” – or default – criterion, the following account suggests that the notion of hybridity, when used in the ordinary meaning of the word, is likely to reinforce – not qualify or clarify – the ambiguity of power relations more broadly involved in global governance. The argument is further supported by a detailed genealogy of the concept of governance which shows that it primarily enables authority to be exerted without full control of sovereign rights. While this sheds light on the common use of hybridity to deal with the ambiguous power of standards, it does not dissect the defining properties of such power. This will be done in the subsequent section focused on what hybrids eventually are or can be.

Many studies attempt to respond to the definitional challenge raised by the pervasive influence of standards and other kinds of market instruments in the functioning of the global economy by invoking the term ‘hybrid’. Of note in this regard are debates in legal studies on complementarity and rivalry in the intersection of public and private standards, hard and soft law, and the layering of rules in ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of governance, especially in the context of the European Union and the WTO (Mahler, Reference Mahler2007; Trubek and Trubek, Reference Trubek and Trubek2007; Bartley, Reference Bartley2011; Zumbansen, Reference Zumbansen2011; Jurcys et al., Reference Jurcys, Kjaer and Yatsunami2013; Frydman, Reference Frydman, Frydman and Wayenberger2014; Pauwelyn, Reference Pauwelyn2014). The notion of hybridity is brought in to characterise a distinct feature of regulation closer to a society-centred approach reaching out to a global level of analysis. According to Kjaer, the hybrid dimension of such a regulatory environment has even become ‘common place insofar as the combined forces of globalisation and privatisation and an increased reliance on self-regulation have resulted in the emergence of regulatory arrangements which combine elements of several legal orders’ (Kjaer, Reference Kjaer, Jurčys, Kjaer and Yatsunami2013: 3).Footnote ¹ With the growth of third-party independent or semi-independent actors, standard-setting bodies and accreditation agencies, deregulation has indeed given way to the emergence, extension, and consolidation of new and more complex forms of regulation. This is all the more visible in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Levi-Faur emphasises that this new golden age of regulation prompts a ‘hybrid architecture of regulatory capitalism’ (Levi-Faur, Reference Levi-Faur and Levi-Faur2011a: 5). In today’s world, a more comprehensive understanding of regulation should take stock of ‘different systems of control, where statist regulation co-evolves with civil regulation, national regulation expands with international and global regulation, private regulation co-evolves and expands with public regulation, business regulation co-evolves with social regulation, voluntary regulations expand with coercive ones, and the market itself is used or mobilised as a regulatory mechanism’ (Levi-Faur, Reference Levi-Faur2011b: 668). In this analysis, hybridity describes the juxtaposition of state, market, and civil society actors in nearly all of the twenty-seven possible forms of regulatory design that combine regulators, regulatees, and third parties (Levi-Faur, Reference Levi-Faur and Levi-Faur2011a: table 1, p.9). While this helps shed light on recent changes in the politics of regulation, the hybrid attribute is mostly used to denote the complexity that derives from the involvement of new actors in the regulatory design of capitalism, whether market-based or not-for-profit civil society organisations.

With the concept of ‘innovation hybrids’, Weiss brings the semantic field of hybridity one step closer to a major feature of contemporary global political economy. She draws upon Koppell’s (Reference Koppell2003) organisational typology of quasi-governments as complex partnership arrangements between public and private actors set in the distinct context of market organisation and innovation in the United States. Far from being confined to an organisational feature of an assumed neoliberal policy privileging privatisation and outsourcing, the concept of innovation hybrids carries, for Weiss, a much wider implication: they ‘blunt the [national security] state’s impact and blur its visible presence in economic governance, avoid political blockage, and promote the business of innovation’ (Weiss, Reference Weiss2014: 147). The pervasiveness and significance of innovation hybrids is evidence of the extent to which technological pre-eminence has furthered the American model of capitalism and sustained American military dominance through the dramatic changes in the security environment from the Cold War years to the post-9/11 era. This broader understanding of the hybrid attribute of contemporary global political economy arrangements echoes the argument put forward in Hurt and Lipschutz (Reference Hurt and Lipschutz2016). As stated in the introduction, here the hybrid rule constitutes a new phase of state formation. In contrast to analyses that emphasise how neoliberalism led to a retreat of the state in favour of privatisation, the authors maintain that state power is enhanced by privatisation and the ensuing depolitisation of the public sphere. As such, political developments often lack accountability; they can just as well help reinforce a closure of the public domain and accommodate a more authoritarian capitalist regime. New research on transitions has also acknowledged the importance of ‘regime-hybridity’ in developing countries to understand the role that democratic and undemocratic components of political regimes play in the trade-offs between formal and substantial democracy in economic transformation (Zinecker, Reference Zinecker2009).

A prominent feature of contemporary global politics is indeed the ability of a wide range of agents to cooperate across borders to establish rules recognised as legitimate by states and non-state actors that have not formally delegated their sovereign rights for such mandates.Footnote ² The scale at which globalisation is transforming the spatial organisation of social relations and production processes has magnified not only the way in which communities and issues are linked across nations, regions, and continents but also the power relations behind them. It is in this respect that international standards and global governance can be viewed as parts of a policy project supporting the involvement of new actors in the policy process, assuming that they would better tackle complex issues across borders. If left to either market self-regulation or plain state regulation, the argument goes, these transformations would be difficult to manage, lack efficiency, and, in the end, legitimacy. To be sure, cross-border modes of cooperation between public and private actors have not replaced the authority of the nation-state, and there is no reason to believe that they will in the near future. Yet, nation-states, as Held et al. (Reference Held1999: 49) pointed out long ago, ‘have gradually become enmeshed in and functionally part of a larger pattern of global transformations and global flows’. If international policy coordination was hitherto chiefly played out within the confines of interstate multilateralism, and the power struggles therein, the project of global governance has taken a more depoliticised and functionalist turn. Where does this come from and how does it bring us back to the ubiquity of hybrids to which international standards belong?

At its core, the notion of governance refers to the act of exerting power without the appearance of doing so. As Guzzini points out, ‘the two concepts of power and governance, although related, should not be conflated’ (Guzzini, Reference Guzzini, Guzzini and Neumann2012: 3). Accordingly, the rise of global governance does not just reflect a diffusion of power; it also allows for informal rule that re-articulates the global political order and ‘may well increase control’ (Guzzini, Reference Guzzini, Guzzini and Neumann2012: 27). The notion of global governance thus echoes what we have seen so far with hybrids. Power mechanisms of any and all political, ideological, and technical persuasions are likely to take advantage of a fuzzy understanding of actors, forms, and sites associated with the exercise of authority. This suggests that the usage of the notion of governance enables the exercise of authority over a defined domain and population without the plain attributes of power imparted by sovereign rights. The following account looks at the genealogy of global governance from such a perspective focused on the ambiguous power relations highlighted by the notion of hybrid.Footnote ³

First employed in the thirteenth century to denote the action or manner of governing, the term ‘governance’ initially referred simply to government. Yet, its reference object progressively moved away from the heart of power in the context of the development of the modern state, the centralisation of political authority, and the transformation of the principle of sovereignty that went together with the rise of modernity. The term eventually decoupled entirely from the actual centre of sovereign power. As Hewitt de Alcántara (Reference Hewitt de Alcantara1998: 109 – my translation) points out, ‘while the concept applies to many situations where there is no political system as such, it still implies the existence of a political process’. Its usage has even come to presume governing practices that thoroughly exclude the type of political sovereignty found in modern democracies. As we will see later, this can be particularly advantageous in situations when sovereign states are confronted with groups that subscribe to different political orientations and push for different political projects. In these cases, governance serves as a handy approach to reform in lieu of formal and more radical institutional change.

This understanding of governance has proved strikingly fruitful. The term came in political vogue at the turn of the twentieth century, in response to the first convulsions of independence within the British Empire. Not surprisingly, governance was used as a woolly definition of sovereign self-determination to justify reforms in the colonial status of key Crown territories, particularly India in the wake of the crisis related to the partition of Bengal (Silburn, Reference Silburn1910; Stuart-Linton, Reference Stuart-Linton1912; Low, Reference Low1913). A few decades later, pioneer studies in management and organisational studies reclaimed the notion in reference to an even more specific feature of economic power. Here, governance was seen as a tool to solve issues arising from the separation between capital management and capital ownership in the context of big firms. The relationship between the two dimensions of capital control, which had already been legally codified in the financial schemes of long distance trade established in the early days of mercantile capitalism, was further refined by the introduction of the concept of governance in the economics literature of the 1930s. Unlike state law, corporate governance focused on new models of corporate decision-making and behaviour in response to the rising power of waged managers in large American firms since the end of the nineteenth century. This analysis of the advent of the new managerial figure and the governance functions of corporate managers was introduced by Berle and Means (Reference Berle and Means1932).

The notion of governance gathered steam in the context of the managerial revolution of Fordism and Keynesianism. It marked the successful rise to power of managers, who had started to share with the state and trade unions the responsibility for mass production, mass consumption, and the redistribution of high productivity gains. After several decades of undisputed consensus, the function of managers was again questioned at the beginning of the 1970s, first in the United States and then in Europe and the rest of the world. With falling productivity and increasing wage claims, trade-offs between owners and managers took a new turn – this time in favour of the former. New modelling techniques were produced, which reoriented the management utility function towards the valuation of shares on the stock market (Pérez, Reference Pérez2003: 35). Governance became a paragon of shareholders’ value-based management and, at the same time, a watchword of the 1970s attempts to liberalise various aspects of the political order away from governmental or intergovernmental decision-making processes. With the demise of Fordism, owners of capital and top managers claimed the need to replace sovereign governments with corporate governance in arbitrating the distribution of productivity gains between capital and labour.

This shift went one step forward in the late 1980s. Governance, hitherto confined to the world of corporate management, was now to reach the four corners of the world. International financial institutions, such as the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, greatly contributed to the popularisation of the concept of governance in reaction to mounting critiques over the repeated failures of development aid and structural adjustment programmes. With an emphasis on good governance, they recognised the need to complement purely market-oriented development models with measures to improve the quality of institutions in charge of reforms. Good governance enabled international institutions to abdicate responsibility for any development failure by adding domestic requirements as conditions for funding development programmes out of the debt crisis.Footnote ⁴ It followed, so the argument went, that the governments of incompetent and corrupt developing countries had to relinquish control to the external constraints of the world economy. To pick up on Gutner’s taxicab analogy, international institutions used the language of good governance to issue explicit policy instructions while still leaving developing countries in the driving seat; de jure authority remained with the state, but de facto control shifted elsewhere (Gutner, Reference Gutner, Avant, Finnemore and Sell2010). Without let or hindrance, development finance made its way deep into the heart of the sovereign political sphere under the smoke and mirrors of good governance and new management principles (Osmont, Reference Osmont1998).

The establishment of the Commission on Global Governance in 1992, on the back of the post-Cold War burst of enthusiasm for greater collective responsibility, lent even more credit to the notion of global governance. However, its definition remained vague, as it describes ‘the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs’ (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 2–3). Unsurprisingly, the work of the Commission did not prevent successive studies from casting doubt on the likelihood of governance undermining multilateralism as the prevailing form of collective action within the United Nations system. Perhaps de Senarclens put it best: ‘advocates of this prescriptive approach tend to mingle all actors of the international realm in a large and woolly set, without hierarchy regarding their roles and political influence on systems of regulation [which results in the] naïve valorisation of non-state actors, particular multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations and international organisations’ (Senarclens, Reference Senarclens1999: 201). Behind the veil of complexity and comprehensiveness, global governance is far from ideologically neutral. In fact, there is no scarcity of scholars describing it as an ideological project aimed at enforcing a particular – in most accounts, neoliberal – world order (Payne, Reference Payne and Phillips2005).

Governance, in one form or another, features equally heavily in the discourse around institutional innovation at the level of the European Union. Not only is the notion well suited to a supranational institution without full sovereign rights; it can also be used to sidestep the old debate between intergovernmentalists and neofunctionalists. ‘Multi-level governance’ made its debut as a European research programme in the 1990s (Marks et al., Reference Marks, Hooghe and Blank1996; Hix, Reference Hix1998; Tömmel and Verdun, Reference Tömmel and Verdun2009). The word now stands in the very title of the latest European Treaty that has come into force in the aftermath of the Euro crisis.Footnote ⁵ But, yet again, the undefined usage of this word leaves considerable leeway to private-public partnerships. It also offers no clear boundaries between, on the one hand, the political and administrative implications of the European tradition of continuous negotiation and, on the other, institutional developments taking place up and down centralised states. It is no coincidence that a great deal of discussion in the literature revolves around the extent to which the language of (multi-level) governance has taken over the language, if not the practice, of democracy, by gradually displacing the notions of expertise, representation, transparency, accountability, and legitimacy (Brassett and Tsingou, Reference Brassett and Tsingou2011; Keohane, Reference Keohane2011; Weiss, Reference Weiss2011). For a long time, it has also given cause for significant asymmetry between the degree of market discipline imposed by the Union on macroeconomic and monetary issues, and the limited room for manoeuvre left to member states for social and regulatory issues (Holman, Reference Holman2004). More generally, the concept of governance has been at the core of the research programme on limited statehood, seeing the plain attributes of power imparted by sovereign rights as an exception of the Western modern nation-state rather than the rule (Risse et al., Reference Risse, Börzel and Draude2018).

Thus far, I showed how governance has meant quite different things throughout history, with increasing ambiguity regarding the attributes on which it lays claims to the exercise of authority. While the notion was confined to constituted powers in the Ancien Régime, the development of the territorial state and the rise of modern democracies progressively decoupled governance from government. Unlike the latter, governance refers to carrying out governing tasks without sovereign powers, generally in new domains such as corporate management, development finance, and macroeconomic regulation. Governance has thus achieved prominence both as a normative compass for legitimating policies claimed to be closer to the people (i.e. good/democratic governance) and as an analytical tool to explore the emergence of a form of polity that is a step removed from both the state and the people (i.e. multi-level/network/informal/private governance). In both cases it remains ambiguous. So long as the notion of governance rests on a fuzzy definition of regulatory authority, qualifying it also as hybrid will hardly help shed light on the definitional criteria of its working institutions.

Since the turn of the millennium and the heydays of globalisation, defining governance, authority, or power as ‘hybrid’ became almost idiomatic in studies focused on the new patterns and actors of regulation involved in contemporary capitalism. Sassen, for example, stressed that ‘the mix of processes we describe as globalization is indeed producing, deep inside the national state, a very partial but significant form of authority, a hybrid that is neither fully private nor fully public, neither fully national nor fully global’ (Sassen, Reference Sassen2003b: 10). In a report of the French Conseil d’Analyse Économique, an institution under the aegis of the Prime Minister, ‘hybrid governance’ was considered the most appropriate way to frame the reform of the world order (Jacquet et al., Reference Jacquet, Pisani-Ferry and Tubiana2002: 74–92). Similarly, the eminent development economist Gerald K. Helleiner (Reference Helleiner2001: 245) predicted that ‘hybrid private–public arrangements’ would probably count among the key purveyors of public goods at the global level. Two decades on, the catchword is still very much in the limelight. The number of actors and issues defined as hybrid has considerably increased. The range of fields concerned has also considerably expanded, with discourses on hybrid regulation featuring in sociology of organisations and production, public administration and administrative law, or security and warfare studies (see among others: Djelic and Quack, Reference Djelic and Quack2010; Miller et al., Reference Miller, Kurunmaki, O’Leary, Higgins and Larner2010; Acheraïou, Reference Acheraïou2011; Levi-Faur, Reference Levi-Faur and Levi-Faur2011a; Belloni, Reference Belloni2012; Jurcys et al., Reference Jurcys, Kjaer and Yatsunami2013; Weiss, Reference Weiss2014; Hurt and Lipschutz, Reference Hurt and Lipschutz2016; Leander, Reference Leander, Hurt and Lipschutz2016; Lanoszka, Reference Lanoszka2016; Bair, Reference Bair2017). According to Djelic and Quack (Reference Djelic and Quack2010: 383) the emergence of transnational communities can thus be described as a permanent fixture of ‘fluid … and hybrid formations out of formal organization and/or networks’ supporting a new form of governance in a complex world. For their part, Dezalay and Garth maintain that global governance relies on competing forms of expertise on a transnational space; here, hybridity is seen as instrumental to overcoming the difficulties encountered in the recognition of this cognitive power in developing countries: a ‘process of hybridization permits the progressive putting in place of new social usages built around foreign governance mechanisms’ (Dezalay and Garth, Reference Dezalay and Garth2011: 282) and presupposes the alteration of a prior ‘logic that accounted for the coherence and relative efficacy of the governing device in the country of origin’ (Dezalay and Garth, Reference Dezalay and Garth2011: 277). All in all, hybridity comes through as a significant attribute of actors and practices involved in the increasingly complex process of globalisation. Yet, be it ‘fluid’ – as Djelic and Quack take it – or ‘altered’ – as Dezalay and Garth would put it – hybridity betrays more the lack of clear defining attributes than an effort to assign global governance a distinct feature.

Thus, returning to my question asking why the notion of hybrid is omnipresent in studies on standards and contemporary global governance debates, it appears particularly handy to take stock of the complexity instigated by new patterns of public and private regulation in contemporary capitalism. While mostly focused on the rise of private actors and standards, it entails much ambiguity on the defining criteria of supposedly new arrangements organising the world economy. It largely remains a default attribute. This second-best categorisation echoes the fuzziness of the concept of governance itself, and is likely to reinforce it. Far from being a mere non-sense, hybridity helps to accommodate multiple and contradictory understandings of global governance. Even if left without further specification, the integration of multiple and contradictory meanings and practices is thus not at all pointless. As Acheraïou points out, the protean nature of discourses on hybridity reflects a ‘structural flexibility’, which greatly contributes to its resilience; it integrates multiple, contradictory, let alone irreconcilable, lines of reasoning and ‘lends itself to ready appropriation by almost anyone, to serve almost any political or ideological purpose’ (Acheraïou, Reference Acheraïou2011: 153). Moreover, the vagueness of the notion is likely to support political disengagement and historical short-sightedness, thereby leaving the door open for misappropriation by both dominant and contending forces. Yet, the concept remains dubious if employed without further historical, geographical, and conceptual roots. This brings me to my second set of questions: can the term hybrid be employed as something more than a default attribute? What are its defining properties, and how does it reflect the distinct, non-conventional form of market creation and regulation embodied by the widespread use of standards in the international economy?

What Hybrids Are

Not just a default attribute, the notion of hybrid conveys substantive attributes which can help make sense of standards as non-conventional forms of power in contemporary capitalism. From this angle, ambiguity becomes a prevailing feature of the criteria that define the authority of standards in creating and regulating markets. Yet, far from a vague conglomeration of actors involved in setting complex rules, ambiguity is seen here as an ontological property of the new tools of global governance of which international standards are a case in point.

In order to understand this ontology, I draw on insights from semiotics, sociology of science, technology and society, and post-colonial studies. In the previous section I showed that the default position of studies laying emphasis on the notion of hybrid would just get us to describe the intermingling of public and private standards as a juxtaposition of state, market, and civil society actors. Semiotics helps us to see hybridity as much more than a default attribute, with a rich and long etymology; its ambiguous meaning and ambivalent values reach back to early representations of collective life. Studies in the sociology of science, technology, and society, for their part, open our eyes beyond the private-public nexus of hybrid governance debates. They emphasise the ambiguous relationship between nature and society, leading to the understanding that standards are never mere technical specifications and always convey social values, be they implicit. Finally, post-colonial studies of hybridity lend support to understanding the cultural and spatial underpinning of power relations conveyed by the ability of standards to extend their authority beyond borders.

First of all, in order to fully grasp the defining properties of hybrids, it is worth thinking back to ancestral figures of human imaginary. From such a larger semiotic perspective, hybrids pervade all sorts of myths’ narratives across time and space (Uranie, 1996). Contrary to the ideal of unity and simplicity found in classicism, they gain their persuasive power through fabulous and multifaceted dimensions. Hybrid creatures form powerful legendary wholes; even if each of their parts is of real and well-defined origins. In Ancient Greece and Rome, couplings between humans and animals usually gave birth to malign monsters. Philologically, the orthography of the word ‘hybrid’ was quickly twisted to express more fully the awe conveyed by such creatures. In Latin, ibrida was used by the Roman naturalist Pliny to describe the crossbreeding of a sow with a wild boar. Shortly afterwards, it became hybridia – replacing the first i with y was meant to call to mind the Greek word hybris, which connotes all sorts of excess and transgression, possibly leading to violence. For instance, the fire-breathing Chimera was an awe-inspiring creature able to melt, devour, and vomit anybody and anything she met; for centuries, she personified evil in early Christian art (Godin, Reference Godin1996: 46).Footnote ⁶ The Minotaur, the monster with a bull’s head and a human body, is probably the most famous of those malign creatures; living in the centre of the Cretan Labyrinth, every ninth year he devoured seven youths and seven maiden sent from Athens as tribute. When the coupling is between humans and gods, however, hybrids usually take a much more benign shape. In those cases, ‘the contribution of divine blood is like a regeneration of the human race’ (Brémond, Reference Brémond1996). Here, the figure of Helen can jog our memory. Daughter of the mortal Leda, wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, yet fathered by Zeus, she is remembered not only for having been the most beautiful mortal on earth, but also for prompting the Trojan War, the founding moment of Greek civilisation. Hence, from a semiotic perspective, rather than being entertaining and naïve characters, hybrid figures disclose fundamental features of the organisation of collective life. Their power lies on a juxtaposition of life forms and qualities that transcends singular purposes. Ambiguity is in itself central to understanding this form of power. As Godin (Reference Godin1996: 40) emphasises, the basic forces of hybrids at work are their ontological ambiguity, wavering between reality and the imaginary, and their affective ambivalence, hesitating between repulsion and seduction. In other words, it is by means of such ontological ambiguity and affective ambivalence that ‘the hybrid has the power of the Whole that s/he symbolizes’ (Godin, Reference Godin1996: 43). In the present world, this underlines how governance instruments such as international standards draw their power from the ambiguity that characterises them as new tools made up from easily identified parts but assembled in such a way as to form inventive artefacts in charge of shaping significant transformations of contemporary capitalism. Similarly, ambivalent views call up feelings of both attraction and repulsion towards such instruments closely related to opportunities and threats associated with globalisation – largely depending on where one stands on the scale of the multifaceted hierarchy of global capitalism.

Studies in the sociology of science, technology and society situate hybrids in the broader context of modernity and the major debates on its crisis. In his analysis of the rise of the ‘risk society’, Beck ties the notion of risk to the ways a ‘hybrid society watches, describes, values and criticizes its own hybridity’ (Beck, Reference Beck1992, Reference Beck, Adam, Beck and van Loon2000: 221). Our society is thus understood to become intrinsically reflexive. Technical issues, previously confined to private choices or narrow bureaucratic decision-making, are increasingly opened to democratic scrutiny. In underlining the growing significance of public scientific and political controversies, Beck considers that ‘the notion of a “hybrid”’ world is necessary, but insufficient [since it] says what it is not – not nature and not society etc. – but it does not really say what it is’ (Beck, Reference Beck, Adam, Beck and van Loon2000: 221). He unmistakably recognises the significance of Latour’s critique of modernity in this discussion. Yet he keeps seeing it as more of a negative than a positive concept and, therefore, failing to provide much guidance to further enquiry.

This is quite misleading. ‘Hybrid’ is, in fact, the conceptual linchpin of Latour’s analysis of the current crisis of modernity and of the theory built to overcome the conundrum that follows from its dichotomic framework of thought (Latour, Reference Latour1991). With examples drawn from the daily reading of the newspaper, such as the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic, HIV contaminations, or competition over computer microchips, hybrids refer to what Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’ belonging neither to nature nor to society but to both of them. Rather than merely negative, the concept reflects an attempt to reunify the understanding of a world torn apart by the advent of modernity. While this combination of natural properties and cultural traits was considered self-evident to pre-modern societies, Latour suggests that the great illusion of modernity – leading to its current crisis – is the belief in the ability to conceal this co-constitution of nature and culture. In its grand design of purification and separation, the argument goes, modernity made nature and society opposite poles in the organisation of collective life. Not only did this process liberate forces to dominate nature in a limitless perspective but it also initiated the domination by the West of the rest of the world, identified as lacking the modern scientific knowledge required to avoid being blinded by the confusion between sign and thing (Latour, Reference Latour1991: 135). From this viewpoint, hybrids reflect the erosion of the great divide that modernity failed to establish between society and nature, humans and non-humans, society and science. With many controversies sketching out imbroglios of scientific, political, economic, legal, and other concerns, standards codify not only technical specifications but more broadly the proliferation of ‘quasi-objects’. Such hybrids call for a complete shift of perspective, which amounts to the application of a principle of symmetry to the analysis of the co-constitutive properties of nature and society. This approach, commonly known as Actor–Network Theory, analyses those co-constitutive properties as networks. Their productive tension overcomes the opposition between structures and agents through processes that can be traced at various scales and across different spaces.Footnote ⁷ This is the purpose of Latour’s so-called new Constitution, whose first guarantee is to avoid separating nature and society again: ‘nature and society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures’ (Latour, Reference Latour1991: 191). While Latour thinks of ‘Parliaments of Things’ as institutional extensions of this line of thought, Callon et al. conceive ‘hybrid fora’ as the new arenas where expert knowledge mingles with lay knowledge to arrive at technical choices involving the wider public and thus encourage a shift from delegative to dialogical democracy (Callon et al., Reference Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe2001: 189). Such embeddedness of scientific and technological choices into social, cultural, and political contexts and institutions can also be conceived as a co-production, according to which ‘there cannot be a proper history of scientific things independent of power and culture’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2004: 21). A number of arenas have put into operation this new form of regulatory politics, such as nuclear waste management, the fight against AIDS epidemics, GMO technologies, and nanotechnologies. For my part, I designed the platform INTERNORM, a pilot project funded by the University of Lausanne (2010–2014) to foster the involvement of civil society associations in ISO technical committees. That interactive knowledge centre based on the sharing of academic skills, ad-hoc expertise, and the experiences accumulated by consumer associations, environmental associations, and trade unions gave a unique opportunity to experience a new way of responding to the democratic deficit rampant in the field of standardisation.Footnote ⁸

Thus, for scholars of science and technology studies, the hybridity of artefacts such as standards is much more than a default attribute describing heterogeneous developments in contemporary global governance. Rather than a mere juxtaposition of private and public actors, hybridity reflects a fundamental property of our relation to the world, in which the two poles of nature and society are intrinsically co-constituted. Hybridity embraces dual function as a form of authority that is used to govern but also as a potential means to engage and resist such forms of governing – all the more so when hybrid fora increasingly shape the organisation of markets (Callon et al., Reference Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa2002: footnote 11). Theorists sharing this alternative view consider that nature–society relationships gain, above all, a foothold in local and ad-hoc conditions, be it the laboratory of Louis Pasteur (Latour, Reference Latour1984), the outpatient department of a large hospital, or so-called publifora, where assemblies of citizens debate new technological challenges (Callon et al., Reference Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe2001, chap. 5). While this helps to understand global governance as a socially embedded practice in line with the so-called practice turn in IR theory (Best, Reference Best2013: 22–25), it leaves us short of a proper understanding of the transnational nature and the global reach of many institutional arrangements involved in such practices. Moreover, such an emphasis on network process tracing of quasi-objects leaves little space for the wide range of actors involved in such contexts, their strategies and capacity to act – and still less for any consideration of the deterritorialisation of sovereign space and power as conventionally understood. This prompts us to pay attention to the third strand of scholarship that has given hybrids central stage.

Post-colonial studies view hybridity as a result, not of mingling nature and society, but of the influence of colonialism on the blurred subjectivities and identities of the colonised subjects throughout the period of decolonisation as well as globalisation. The concept was arguably formulated by Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994) and subsequently widely discussed by authors in literary criticism such as Lionnet (Reference Lionnet1995) and Young (Reference Young1995). To some extent, this debate alone gave a fundamental contribution to the emergence of the very field of post-colonial studies.

Bhabha drew the concept from the Russian linguist Bakhtin in order to overcome Saïd’s (Reference Said1978) analysis of orientalism, which was blamed for its totalising view of power and colonial discursive practices. According to Bakhtin, languages evolve in society like ‘unintentional hybrids’, with mixed worldviews remaining ‘mute and opaque’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981: 360). In contrast, the reconstruction of language by a novelist is often an ‘intentional and conscious hybrid’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981: 366), an ‘artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981: 361). In coining the concept of hybridity, Bhabha makes a similar argument about the ability to transform an unintentional condition of dominance into an intentional strategy of emancipation. On that account, ‘moments of hybridity’ become moments of ‘historical agency’ (Bhabha, Reference Bhabha1994: 208). According to Young, the significance of this argument is stupendous: ‘By grafting the Bhaktinian notion of the subversive and dialogical force of hybridity onto the ambivalence in the colonial encounter, … Bhabha has shifted this subversion of authority through hybridization to the dialogical situation of colonialism’ (Young, Reference Young1995: 22). In doing so, post-colonial studies do not merely define hybridity as a rejection of binary relations of power. They lay emphasis on alternative concepts, such as difference, multiplicity, plurality, fluidity, and ambivalence, in order to stress how existing situations of colonial domination can and have become instruments of resistance. For instance, Ní Mhurchú draws on hybridity to describe certain experiences of subjectivity ‘as a form of ambiguity within, rather than a form of presence across, several nations … at the intersection of citizenship and migration’ (Ní Mhurchú, Reference Ní Mhurchú2015: 167). A number of studies question, however, such possibility of dismantling power structures and idealised valorisations of the struggles of subaltern subjects. According to Prabhu, there are serious doubts that hybridity holds for a “radical conception of agency” if left to such flattened and fanciful means of resistance (Prabhu, Reference Prabhu2007: 2). Together with Prabhu, Kraidy and Acheraïou have also thoroughly criticised the inability of the post-colonial understanding of hybridity to properly address the question of agency in relation to the material structures of power in globalisation, let alone its tacit complicity with a Eurocentric post-modern ethos (Kraidy, Reference Kraidy2005; Acheraïou, Reference Acheraïou2011).

Despite these criticisms, dismissing the concept of hybridity out of hand for our understanding of the power of standards would be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Besides science and technology studies which provide new insights into the significance of ‘quasi-objects’ mediating nature-society relations, the cultural and inter-subjective processes that inscribe the spatial domination of globalisation on a concrete basis are the most obvious lessons to be drawn from post-colonial studies. This is why, for instance, research on the degrading and over-standardised labour of call centres in India and elsewhere, as well as other predicaments associated with the growth of remote services enabled by information and communication technologies, draw so easily on the post-colonial conceptual toolkit (Das and Dharwadkar, Reference Das, Dharwadkar, Banerjee, Chio and Mir2009). From a wider and deeper socio-historical perspective, Acheraïou makes a similar point on the power dynamics and multifarious nature of hybridity in ancient empires, characterised by a spatial domination which was heavily dependent on administrative and political syncretism. Transposed to our contemporary context, the concept of hybridity can thus help us to describe such ‘syncretic modes of governance’ (Acheraïou, Reference Acheraïou2011: 19) or what Cox describes as a ‘plural world of coexisting civilisations’ (Cox, Reference Cox and Schechter2002: 56). Besides shedding light on how standards can be seen as operational devices used to create and regulate markets with strong cultural underpinnings, post-colonial approaches can also reveal concern towards disaggregated spatial structures. Countless studies have focused on the ‘interrelated, if not overlapping, spaces’ of métissage and diaspora (Lionnet, Reference Lionnet1995: 7). The lexical reference to hybridity here helps us to take on an equally illusory understanding of formal territorial sovereign space, still closely or loosely shared among IR scholars. To some extent, it echoes van der Pilj’s far-reaching critique of IR theory as unable to account for various ‘modes of foreign relations’, in which human communities combine different ways to occupy space, to secure it, and to organise exchange between each other. While the global governance project lies on a formal equality of sovereign states, it not only brings on-board ‘the exploitation of nature and society on a world scale’ but also continues to coexist with primeval nomad and imperial modes (Pijl, Reference Pijl2014: viii). Ultimately, the importance given to standards for market access across borders entails a hybrid space whose transnational logic overlaps in many ways states’ territorial sovereignty. Being hybrid, however, this form of authority not only governs market but can also be seen from its opposite side, as a resistance to market power.

In summary, semiotics, science, technology, and society studies, as well as post-colonial approaches, provide insights into the many ways in which hybridity has intrinsic properties. All of them can help define the issues at stake, the actors involved, and the cultural and spatial environment where new actors claim a say in the global governance to which standardisation bodies belong. Just as the ISO is made up of more than 150 private and public bodies designed as the ‘most representative of standardisation in their country’, many other standard development organisations exist and are broadly recognised so long as their instruments are adopted by markets. Quality management standards such as Six Sigma, multi-stakeholders’ initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and metrics designed for professional practices by well-organised associations such as the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) produced by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) of the International Federation of Accountants are all examples of specifications that confer authority (although with very disparate reference bases) on actors seeking market access across borders. Hybridity describes such an ambiguous juxtaposition of power instances that intermingle with the interstate system. As with hybrids, this phenomenon is essentially Janus-faced. Yet, in addition to the resistance strategy envisioned by post-colonial scholarship or networks of symmetric mediations between nature and society, as conceived by Actor–Network Theory, the phenomenon remains anchored in asymmetries of material power that support the global governance project of unifying markets across sovereign territories. In other words, contemporary hybrids sanction new objects and agents which, though fully real, are aggregated in such a way that their defining criteria entail inherent ambiguity and inherent ambivalence in their powers of attraction and identification. This brings us to our third argument, where we will try to specify the categories that remain ambiguous in the idea of hybridity.

How Hybrids Work

It would be presumptuous to reduce the hybrid power of standards in the global political economy to the ambiguous criteria conferring authority to their cross-border endeavour to create and regulate markets. New forms of collective action and international authority – as well as the broader and more disparate influence of non-state actors on the world stage – should be seen as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with multiple material and symbolic aspects. Responding to the question of who standardises what and where thus supposes an understanding of how ambiguity confers authority to new actors and new issues across sovereign spaces.

In her pioneer investigations on the Retreat of the State, Susan Strange suggested that ‘between the two extremes of non-state authorities welcomed and opposed by states lie certain non-state authorities whose relation to governments is variable or ambiguous’ (Strange, Reference Strange1996: 94). In her concluding remarks, she notoriously equated the advent of non-state actors in the arena of global politics to Pinocchio’s problem: at a loss when caught without any more strings to guide him. The lack of a clear definition of non-state actors in world politics has led, in her words, to ‘a ramshackle assembly of conflicting sources of authority’, making it particularly hard to decide ‘where do allegiance, loyalty, identity lie’ (Strange, Reference Strange1996: 199). According to Cutler, it is precisely these conflicting sources of authority that create a new form of private authority in international affairs. Cutler emphasises in particular the political significance of legal doctrines that have twisted the status of the subject of law: ‘the implication of treating corporations and individuals as objects and not subjects are deeply troubling empirically and normatively … [W]hile transnational corporations and private business associations may be objects of law (de jure), they are in fact, operating as subjects (de facto)’ (Cutler, Reference Cutler, Cutler, Haufler and Porter1999, Reference Cutler2003: 149). Analyses in terms of private international authority shed light on the range of actors to have gained authority in an international context that traditionally denied them that privilege. They paved the way for in-depth studies of firms and inter-firm cooperation leading to political roles for actors traditionally associated with the private sphere of economic transactions. They also raised the troubling normative implications of an authority geared towards maximising capital gains and concealing the instruments serving those ends (Gill and Cutler, Reference Gill and Cutler2015). Yet, focused on the cooperation of firms across borders, this approach remains primarily concerned with a sub-set of actors. Since then, countless studies have been published on the wide range of political positions vis-à-vis global governance issues taken on by other non-state actors, such as non-governmental organisations, social movements, global civil society platforms, and, not least, transnational criminal organisations. From technical self-regulation to corporate social responsibility, from environment and labour standards to financial and accounting rules, much of the literature is focused on who governs the global economy through private regulatory tools (Hall and Biersteker, Reference Hall and Biersteker2002b; Schirm, Reference Schirm2004; Grande and Pauly, Reference Grande and Pauly2005; Krause Hansen, Reference Krause Hansen, Krause Hansen and Salskov-Iversen2008; Avant et al., Reference Avant, Finnemore and Sell2010; Djelic and Quack, Reference Djelic and Quack2010; Green, Reference Green2014; Payne and Phillips, Reference Payne and Phillips2014; Gill and Cutler, Reference Gill and Cutler2015). There can be sharp disagreement as to the meaning attributed to the prominence of non-state actors, variously understood as suppliers of private standards making up for the failure of governments to embrace such tasks or as influential corporate actors shaping regulatory outcomes in favour of the financialisation of global capitalism. With a focus on voluntary standards as privileged instruments of global governance mechanisms situated somewhere between those two poles of public and private power, this book aims at looking not only at the ability of private actors and civil society organisations to shape global regulation across borders. Two other aspects play a key role in the reconfiguration of global capitalism: one is the scope of practices involved in standardisation and the other is the reconfiguration of the spatial structure in which those practices are recognised and implemented to such an extent that compliance can be assumed on a transnational basis.

Casting the nature and the implications of the rise of hybrid authority across borders in a broader context thus requires us to consider and aggregate three distinct categories: the subjects wielding authority, the objects concerned, and the space of their deployment. For instance, international standards set by the ISO as well as those provided by the not-for-profit body ASTM International (originally known as American Society for Testing and Materials) entail numerous technical experts and national delegates who play the role of new actors in the nascent technical diplomacy world. The same experts and delegates also define the nature of the objects concerned (from nuts and bolts to sustainable innovation and societal responsibility) and the spatial structure in which they exert their power (on a national, regional, or global scale). The point here is to suggest that ambiguity not only defines the status of the actors involved in standardisation and regulation but also the scope of issues concerned and the space on which such authority is recognised. Following on from the introduction of this chapter, this non-conventional form of power is what I call a transnational hybrid authority, i.e. a form of authority based on the ambiguous juxtaposition of instances of power transforming the relation between transnational capitalism and territorial sovereignty. That said, I still need to specify those ambiguous categories that confer authority to new actors and new issues across sovereign spaces. Transnational hybrid authority is shaped by each of these three dimensions (actors, objects, space) as follows.