Explaining industry influence in the International Maritime Organization

This dissertation explains how industry actors influence environmental maritime regulation in the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The reason for this topic and focus is the significant implications for the role of private actors in global regulatory affairs, coupled with the relative lack of explanations concerning how industry actors actually change political outcomes when they participate as political discussants. In the IMO, industry actors have extensive access to policy development, which makes it a relevant case to understand in more detail. The theoretical basis of the dissertation is rooted in organizational institutionalism, but the foundation for the issue and its relevance is drawn from International Political Economy (IPE) literature. One novelty of the use of organizational institutionalism is the perspective it offers in terms of understanding the way IMO deliberations play out. Core concepts are institutionalized norms, values, and taken-for-granted beliefs, which together serves as the base for explaining the power of industry actors in the IMO and the way these actors exercise influence. Methodologically, the dissertation approached this issue through direct participation in IMO sessions and the use of interviews with IMO delegates from 2016 through 2018, which includes almost 300 hours of observation and more than 60.000 words of field notes. The material was analysed qualitatively by using process-tracing, which allowed the inference of the most plausible explanation of how industry influence works. The findings of the dissertation shows that industry actors gain influence by deploying technical arguments to influence substance or appeals to consistency to influence format of the regulation. State delegates and other industry delegates consider the use of technical arguments to be legitimate, because IMO delegates fundamentally view the IMO process as one of solving technical problems and making global standards rather than a political process. Industry achieves influence when state delegates believe the reasoning and substance of the technical arguments makes sense, as long as state delegates believe the issue under discussion is not too political to allow industry influence. This results in a constant balance, where state delegates weigh the political contention against the potential contribution of industry actors in a given discussion. One important implication of this is the role of ‘invisible rules’, or institutionalized norms and beliefs, in the structuring of industry influence. Industry power is both constrained and enabled by beliefs and norms that IMO delegates’ largely take for granted, rather than formal rules or procedures that protect the IMO from capture by private interests. This dissertation and its findings add to the theoretical understanding of industry power in global governance and international regulation by showing how industry influence pans out in a specific case, and expanding the theoretical repertoire for how researchers can approach such challenges. It also adds to the discussion about the appropriate role of firms and business interests in political life, and shows that there are nuances in the way industry power can be controlled and misused in an intergovernmental organization

The Architectural Enablement of a Digital Platform Strategy

Facing the opportunities and threats arising from digitalization, traditional brick-and-mortar companies are increasingly following the lead of digital natives and seeking speed in the development of digital value propositions. This ability hinges on the flexibility and evolvability of each company’s existing information systems landscape. As a result, the underlying architecture has turned into a crucial determinant of a company’s proficiency to leverage the business potential induced by new inventions in digital technologies. This PhD thesis elaborates on the digitalization journey of the LEGO Group to investigate how companies create innovation-enabling platform architectures to overcome previous limitations to digital innovation as well as international expansion. Based on the theoretical findings from four individual research papers, the pervasive analysis presented in this thesis explains the phenomenon of architecting from a configurational perspective. The research results provide a contingent conceptual understanding of the mechanisms through which architecture decisionmaking produces innovation-enabling or -constraining outcomes for the overall platform architecture. Portraying Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a central mechanism to guide the transformational journey, the four individual research papers explain (1) how the dynamic capability of EA can be built, (2) how EA as a function drives a company’s platformization journey, and (3) how this transformation removes previous barriers to digital innovation as well as internationalization into digitized markets

Implications for Public Policy

Energy Systems Integration (ESI) is an emerging paradigm and at the centre of the EU energy debate. ESI takes a holistic view of the electricity, gas and heat sectors to deliver a clean, reliable and affordable energy system. By identifying and exploiting the synergies within and between the sectors, ESI aims to increase flexibility in the energy system, maximize the integration of renewable energy and distributed generation, and reduce environmental impact. While ESI-enabling technologies have been studied from a technical perspective, the economic, regulatory and policy dimensions of ESI are yet to be analysed. This paper discusses ESI in a multi-step approach. We first focus on the economics of ESI-enabling technologies. We briefly discuss how the EU national regulators incentivise their adoption. We identify major economic and policy barriers to ESI and propose policy solutions to overcome these barriers. We conclude that current regulatory frameworks in the EU do not stimulate sufficient ESI investments and only through proper design of incentives the ESI paradigm could be achieved

Political Economy of Reform and Regulation in the Electricity Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa

As part of electricity sector reforms, Sub-Saharan African countries have established independent regulatory agencies to signal legal and political commitment to end selfregulation and provision of service by the state. The reforms aimed to encourage private investments, improve efficiency, and extend the service to the millions who lacked the service. However, after nearly two and half decades of reforms, these expectations have not been met and the electricity sectors of these countries remain undeveloped. There are anecdotes that these outcomes are due to poor design, non-credible, unpredictable regulations, and political interference. This paper studies the performance of the reforms in the context of government political ideology. We use a dynamic panel estimator and data from 45 Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate ideological differences in the effect of independent sector regulation on access to electricity and installed capacity. We find negative impact from independent regulation on installed capacity in countries with leftwing governments while we find a positive effect in countries with right-wing governments. Moreover, we find negative impact on electricity access in countries with left-wing governments. These results have interesting policy implications for attracting private sector participation to increase generation capacity and access rates especially in countries with left-wing governments

On proliferation and containment

This is a paper-based dissertation, consisting of a ‘cape’ and three articles, one of which is singleauthored. The topic is servitization at work. Servitization is a competitive strategy that, typically, Western industrial manufacturing companies implement in order to secure their continued existence in increasingly competitive markets. Servitization means combining products with a service component. With increasing servitization implementation, companies move away from focusing on the sales of products and instead emphasize their use, for example by repairing them, renting them out or by operating and maintaining machines for clients. But more recent literature also highlights that companies face many challenges when implementing servitization, up to the point where some close their service business again. This indicates that servitization has important implications to it other than ‘just’ selling services. This dissertation argues that some of these implications have gone by unnoticed because much of the literature is both rooted in and itself perpetuating a number of widely-held assumptions. Taking on a pragmatic stance, it explores how servitization is at work, despite the challenges associated with it. In so doing, it challenges three taken-for-granted notions in the literature, namely that customers demand services by default, that products are stable and that servitization is one definite thing. It draws on the infralanguage and methodology provided by Actor-Network Theory. In particular, it mobilizes the ideas around qualification, inscription and multiplicity