It is obvious from this account of diVerent theoretical positions that there arepowerful tensions between diVerent ways of conceiving how the institutions of
economic regulation are shaped: as an outcome of historical contingency, or as a
response to secular social conditions, such as high complexity. Accounts of the
changing character of regulation, which fall under the third major heading
identiWed at the start of this section—globalization—exemplify this tension. One
inXuential way is to think of globalization as diVusing the power of American (or
Euro-American) institutions. In this account, globalization involves strengthening
the hand of a raft of institutions of global economic management that are
heavily under American inXuence, or under the inXuence of American-led
alliances: Among the most obvious at the macro level are institutions such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; at the meso level, regulatory
bodies concerned with the regulation of markets and sectors, such as IOSCO, the
main international federation of securities markets regulators; and at the micro
level the carriers of structural power, notably the great transnational corporations. 3
On this account, we are seeing indeed a newly conWgured relationship between
political and economic institutions, adapting to the development of an economy
increasingly organized on a global scale, where the characteristic institution of
globalization—the multinational corporation—routinely organizes its aVairs to
evade the control of national regulatory authorities. (Consider, for instance,
Strange 1996 ; Dicken 1998 .) But this new ‘‘global regulatory state’’ is developing
a set of institutions, and economic practices which are heavily mediated by
American structural power. Regulatory practice is in turn shaped by domestic
American regulatory cultures. Regulatory outcomes are the result of hard bargain-
ing governed by the contours of American structural power. The result diVuses
the special institutional practices of the American regulatory state, notably its
pathologies of adversarialism and juridiWcation.
Contrast this with the picture presented in Braithwaite and Drahos’s
( 2000 ) study of global business regulation. Here global change has produced a
‘‘decentered’’ world where state institutions are only one of a wide range of
bodies concerned with economic regulation. Webs of governance join a dizzying
variety of institutions in the regulatory process: bits of states, Wrms, trade
associations, NGOs, and many more. The connections between political and
economic institutions—and indeed between economic institutions—are shifting
and unstable. The borders between the economic and the political, the global, the
regional, the national, and the sub-national, are barely recognizable; and the
conventional language of power used to describe the internal character of those
institutions, and their relations to each other, is of little use. This returns us to
two key general themes. TheWrst is the uncertainty, highlighted at the very start
3 On the evidence and debates surrounding the propositions about these levels see, respectively:
Nye 2002 ; Lutz 1998 ; Strange 1996.
150 michael moran