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With a focus on the concept of grounding, this special section argues that the politics of transnational private governance should be understood in the double meaning of, on the one hand, its local implementation and, on the other hand, practices of political contestation and translation. The concept of grounding thus allows for a localised focus on practices used by actors in transnational private governance. By doing so, we hope to make three contributions to the current debate. The first is to never lose sight that governance is first and foremost about politics; the second is to provide a conceptual framework making more explicit the intrinsic limits of transnational private governance efforts; the third is about the form of power exercised by transnational private regulatory initiatives in global production networks. This introduction provides historiographical and conceptual background to this special section, which brings in scholars across social sciences, including political science, sociology, law and philosophy. It introduces the contributions from research communities that usually remain separate in their analysis of standards used in global production networks in the domain of labour, environment, and human rights.

Little consensus exists about the effectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: first, the ability of workers' organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to effectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers' capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital-labor relations between the transnational and national levels.

This paper explores the role of international standards in the globalisation of the service economy. Various strands of economic analyses consider that core attributes of services affect their ability to be reliably delocalised, industrialised, and standardised. In contrast, international political economy (IPE) approaches draw attention to power configurations supporting conflicting use of standards across industries and nations. The paper examines the case of the Indian service industry in business process outsourcing to probe these opposing views. The findings suggest that standards matter in types of services conventionally identified as unlikely to be standardised, and that their use raises little conflict. An IPE perspective on service standardisation highlights, however, the importance of potential power issues likely to be included in more progressive forms of standardisation.