Explaining corporate engagement with international standard setters: the effects of corporate supply chain management and preferences on regulation

This paper analyses the relationship between corporate organisational structure and regulatory preferences in shaping corporations’ interactions with international organisations. Focusing on two major pillars of private regulation, international standards setting and public private initiatives, we argue that companies that are in favour of more public regulation as well as those that actively manage their supply chains engage more with international private standard setting bodies. We find empirical support for these expectations. Moreover, our results show that both factors reinforce each other. This enables us to discriminate empirically between two competing rationales for corporate engagement with private standard setters: regulation seeking, and the pre-emption of costly public regulation. Our findings lend support to the former: firms engage with private standard setters for the same reasons that they favour regulation more generally.