Transnational Communities: Shaping Global Economic Governance

Transnational communities are social groups that emerge from mutual interaction across national boundaries, oriented around a common project or 'imagined' identity. This common project or identity is constructed and sustained through the active engagement and involvement of at least some of its members. Such communities can overlap in different ways with formal organizations but, in principle, they do not need formal organization to be sustained. This book explores the role of transnational communities in relation to the governance of business and economic activity. It does so by focusing on a wide range of empirical terrains, including discussions of the Laleli market in Istanbul, the institutionalization of private equity in Japan, the transnational movement for open content licenses, and the mobilization around environmental certification. These studies show that transnational communities can align the cognitive and normative orientations of their members over time and thereby influence emergent transnational governance arrangements.

About the Author

Marie-Laure Djelic is Professor of Management at ESSEC Business School, France. She is the author of Exporting the American Model (1998), which obtained the 2000 Max Weber Award for the Best Book in Organizational Sociology from the American Sociological Association. Sigrid Quack is Head of the Institution Building Across Borders research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, and Associate Professor in the Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne.