On Friday, January 16, Professor Parella will present her work in progress, “Institutional Legitimacy in the Global Value Chain,” at a faculty workshop at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, IN.
From the abstract:
Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the growth of private standard-setting and monitoring as a means to control environmental and labor conditions in international production. Enforcing private standards introduces a historically unfamiliar problem for the transnational business sector: institutional legitimacy. Institutional legitimacy is usually associated with public administration but its need also emerges at the edges of the global marketplace where businesses now undertake private governance. Legitimacy is important to the project of private governance because businesses confront a diverse and expanding audience of stakeholders who often have conflicting interests: consumers, shareholders, suppliers, suppliers’ subcontractors and workers, local and foreign government officials, media, international and local NGOs, international and local unions, and community groups. Businesses need to develop strategies whereby these different stakeholders accept outcomes even if their interests do not ultimately prevail. This is the pluralist challenge from the public arena that has now been replicated within the global marketplace.
