TY - JOUR
T1 - Between Stakeholders and Third Parties
T2 - Regulatory Rankings and the Organization of Competition
AU - Samiolo, Rita
AU - Mehrpouya, Afshin
N1 - Funding Information:
In its first five years, the Foundation struggled to attract funding and its founder, Wim Leereveld, was its only permanent employee. The Foundation outsourced the development of Index 2008 to Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, a firm specialized in producing environmental and social ratings of listed companies for use by investors. In 2009, the Index received multi-year funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK Department for International Development and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the acquisition of Innovest by MSCI Group, the latter remained in charge of the development of Index 2010 and 2012. The development of Index 2014 was partly outsourced to Sustainalytics, another global investor focused ESG research firm, whereas since Index 2016 the whole research process has been conducted by an in-house team of analysts.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by Emerald Publishing Limited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/7/22
Y1 - 2021/7/22
N2 - Governance initiatives based on rankings are predicated on the possibility of making companies compete for the achievement of social goals by means of public comparisons of performance. The public of such performance - the ranker and various stakeholders in whose name the ranker speaks - thus fulfills the role of a “third party” whose favor is sought by competitors in what Simmel analyzed as “pure” or “indirect” competition. Yet little is known about how rankers seek to produce or entice such favor in order to enact competition. Through the case of the Access to Medicine Index, we examine the process of selective foregrounding, enticing and orchestration of different stakeholders through the gearing of the ranking’s information infrastructure aimed at optimizing the type and intensity of the competitive pressure exercised on the ranked. We illustrate how the ranker segments the public into different third parties, some well-identified stakeholders alongside a more anonymous audience. We find that stakeholders perceived as wielding legitimate power in the eyes of companies (such as investors) are actively equipped with the tools to witness competition, whereas stakeholders seen as powerful but involved in an agonistic relation with the companies (such as radical Non-Governmental Organizations) are discretely groomed at a distance, while those stakeholders with no perceived power over companies tend to remain unequipped. Whilst the gaze of stakeholders as third parties is differentiated along the lines of a hierarchy of observations, the voice of stakeholders as representatives of different interests is equalized and unified so as to adhere to an ideal of consensus. We reflect on how the needs of competition and those of stakeholder representation come to intersect in the particular governance space of access to medicine. Competition, far from being the automatic consequence of rankings, emerges as a contrived and laborious enactment requiring painstaking attention to publics and their selective equipment as third parties. Understanding the modes of such enactment is thus crucial for appreciating rankings’ governance outcomes.
AB - Governance initiatives based on rankings are predicated on the possibility of making companies compete for the achievement of social goals by means of public comparisons of performance. The public of such performance - the ranker and various stakeholders in whose name the ranker speaks - thus fulfills the role of a “third party” whose favor is sought by competitors in what Simmel analyzed as “pure” or “indirect” competition. Yet little is known about how rankers seek to produce or entice such favor in order to enact competition. Through the case of the Access to Medicine Index, we examine the process of selective foregrounding, enticing and orchestration of different stakeholders through the gearing of the ranking’s information infrastructure aimed at optimizing the type and intensity of the competitive pressure exercised on the ranked. We illustrate how the ranker segments the public into different third parties, some well-identified stakeholders alongside a more anonymous audience. We find that stakeholders perceived as wielding legitimate power in the eyes of companies (such as investors) are actively equipped with the tools to witness competition, whereas stakeholders seen as powerful but involved in an agonistic relation with the companies (such as radical Non-Governmental Organizations) are discretely groomed at a distance, while those stakeholders with no perceived power over companies tend to remain unequipped. Whilst the gaze of stakeholders as third parties is differentiated along the lines of a hierarchy of observations, the voice of stakeholders as representatives of different interests is equalized and unified so as to adhere to an ideal of consensus. We reflect on how the needs of competition and those of stakeholder representation come to intersect in the particular governance space of access to medicine. Competition, far from being the automatic consequence of rankings, emerges as a contrived and laborious enactment requiring painstaking attention to publics and their selective equipment as third parties. Understanding the modes of such enactment is thus crucial for appreciating rankings’ governance outcomes.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109414883&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1108/S0733-558X20210000074029
DO - 10.1108/S0733-558X20210000074029
M3 - Article
SN - 0733-558X
VL - 74
SP - 77
EP - 100
JO - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
JF - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
ER -