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Our aim in this article is to demonstrate that corporate technical activity and corporate political activity can overlap substantially or intertwine in ways quite difficult to tease apart analytically. Theories of corporate political activity must therefore be modified to include technical standardization as potentially part of such activity. The article proposes a conceptual framework for studying such situations and argues for the existence of a “political standardizer,” defined as a company that works for or through technical standardization as a political strategy. Such a firm pursues political objectives in its technical standardization practices. The article illustrates this argument with a case study of the toy producer LEGO®. The case study provides support for existence of a political standardizer and illustrates concretely how technical and political activities are combined by a particular company.

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The EU internal market has predominantly been studied in terms of changes in delegation of authority and division of labor between EU institutions and member states. However, this EU internal focus ignores that already in 1987 the completion of the internal market was substantially left to the private European standardization organizations (ESO). The paper addresses two fundamental challenges in this transnational, public-private, and internal-external delegation of authority. First, it involves a governance challenge, because private actors are directly involved-but to a certain extent outside EU political and administrative control-in the constitution of the internal market. Second, the delegation raises important analytical questions concerning the identification of the institutional locus of European integration, when the realization of the political goals with the internal market is dependent on an inter-organizational coordination between the EU and ESO. Applying the analytical concept of a 'policy field' the analysis shows how the completion of the internal market fundamentally challenges institutionalized conceptions of the role of politics in constituting markets.