Meta-Organizing for Sustainability: A Comparative Analysis of NGO and Industry-Driven Efforts

Abstract

Continued proliferation and competition amongst sustainability standard-setting organizations in most global industries and issue areas has generated considerable interest in understanding the mechanisms that may lead to standards harmonization. Drawing on the collective action and meta-organization literatures, this study sheds light on the organization of sustainability meta-governance, underscoring differences in objectives, organizational structures and mechanisms for dealing with collective action dilemmas. By means of 41 interviews and 439 archival documents, we employ a comparative case study approach to examine how eight different industry meta-governors deal with these key issues and how these differ from NGO-based approaches. Findings reveal that NGO and industry-based meta-regulators hold opposing conceptions of harmonization and develop considerably dissimilar mechanisms for bringing these about. While NGO meta-governors’ pluralistic, legitimacy-based approaches have been referred to as “creating a market for standards”, we suggest that industry meta-governors’ centralized approach, characterized by industry concentration and supply chain governance, is best described as “standards commoditization”. We outline implications of this study for both practice and future research.