Market, regulation, market, regulation

International audienceThis paper focuses on the European Regulatory system which was settled both for opening the Single Market for products and ensuring the consumers' safety. It claims that the New Approach and Standardization, and the Global Approach to conformity assessment, which suppressed the last technical barriers to trade in Europe, realized the free movement of products by organizing progressively several orders of markets and regulation. Based on historical and institutional documents, on technical publications, and on interviews, this article relates how the European Commission and the Member States had alternatively recourse to markets and to regulations, at the three main levels of the New Approach Directives implementation. The article focuses also more specifically on the Medical Devices sector, not only because this New Approach sector has long been controversial in Europe, and has recently been concerned by an important regulatory failure, but also because it is regulated by totally other means in the United States of America. At a time when the Medical Devices sector is part of TTIP discussions, this article allows a better understanding of the diverse stakeholders and regulators positions in the EU

Negotiating the EU Internal Market for Products

The EU internal market has predominantly been studied in terms of changes in delegation of authority and division of labor between EU institutions and member states. However, this EU internal focus ignores that already in 1987 the completion of the internal market was substantially left to the private European standardization organizations (ESO). The paper addresses two fundamental challenges in this transnational, public-private, and internal-external delegation of authority. First, it involves a governance challenge, because private actors are directly involved – but to a certain extent outside EU political and administrative control – in the constitution of the internal market. Second, the delegation raises important analytical questions concerning the identification of the institutional locus of European integration, when the realization of the political goals with the internal market is dependent on an inter-organizational coordination between the EU and ESO. Applying the analytical concept of a ‘policy field’ the analysis shows how the completion of the internal market fundamentally challenges institutionalized conceptions of the role of politics in constituting markets. Keywords: Internal market, policy field, technical standards, transnationalization, new approach harmonization, private product polic

A viral perspective on bureaucracy and scientific management

The virus metaphor may be used in studies of management knowledge not only as a way of describing diffusion processes but also as a way of thinking about viral elements of knowledge production. In the present article, organizational viruses are viewed as ensembles of basic distinctions that are constitutive of concrete bodies of knowledge and which form mutable engines of organizational self-descriptions. Organizational viruses, we contend, are both characterized by stability in terms of their basic productive configuration, while at the same time allowing for a high degree of variation in terms of concrete management knowledge and practice. The article is structured as follows. After the introduction, we first develop the notion of organizational virus as into an analytical approach. Second, we discern in the work of Frederick Taylor on scientific management and Max Weber on bureaucracy, two quite distinct viral configurations that we claim have infected most modern management knowledge – both on a discursive level and on the level of concrete organizational self-descriptions and practice. Third, we discuss our findings and raise the question of how viruses ‘work’, how they interact, and why they become infectious

Privat produktpolitik i det indre marked

De politiske og administrative studier af det indre markeds færdiggørelse har overvejende fokuseret på, hvordan gennemførelsen er bundet til en forandring af kompetence‐ og arbejdsdelingen mellem de eksisterende EU institutioner og medlemslandene. Et sådant EU internt fokus ser imidlertid bort fra, at væsentlige dele af gennemførelsen allerede i 1987 med Fællesaktens vedtagelse blev overladt til de private europæiske standardiseringsorganisationer (ESO2). Når man tænker på, hvor vigtig en rolle disse organisationer er tildelt i udviklingen af det indre marked, kan det undre, at denne uddelegering hidtil ikke har været belyst i nævneværdigt omfang. For det første synes uddelegeringen at indeholde demokratiske udfordringer, fordi private aktører gennem medlemsskab af de autonome europæiske standardiseringsorganisationer deltager direkte og i et vist omfang uden for politisk og administrativ kontrol i at fastlægge reglerne for markedsførelsen af varer i det indre marked. For det andet rejser uddelegeringen en række analytiske spørgsmål om, hvor EU integrationens institutionelle locus skal findes, når sikringen af EUs politiske målsætninger med det indre marked er afhængig af en inter‐organisatorisk koordination mellem EU og ESO. Udover at det indre marked er betinget af institutionelle forandringer inden for rammerne af EU er det ligeledes afhængig af en institutionsdannelse mellem de gensidigt autonome organisationer EU og ESO. Endelig, for det tredje, indebærer uddelegeringen en særskilt udfordring for ESO. I takt med at europæisk teknisk standardisering skal indfri bredere samfundsmæssige og politiske hensyn i markedsdannelsesprocessen er der risiko for, at én af de bærende principper i standardiseringsarbejdet, nemlig frivilligheden, sættes under pres. Der er sandsynligvis grænser for, hvad teknisk standardisering kan levere i forhold til samfundsmæssig regulering uden at undergrave sin egen logik

Macro-expectations, aggregate uncertainty, and expected term premia

Based on expectations data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), we construct a real-time proxy for expected term premium changes of US long-term Treasury bonds. We then investigate the economic drivers of these subjective term premium expectations at the level of individual forecasters. Our results indicate that forecasters' term premium expectations are driven by expected macroeconomic conditions as well as the uncertainty of market participants about future output and inflation. An aggregate measure of forecasters' term premium expectations has predictive power for actual bond excess returns over horizons of up to one year