Organizational Fields and International Regimes

Organizational Fields and International Regimes

Michael Lipson

Political Science Department

University of Pennsylvania

June 2001

Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics

University of Pennsylvania

Working Paper Series #01-03

Organizational Fields and International Regimes

Michael Lipson[*]

Introduction

The study of international regimes has been a central area of research into international relations in the last twenty years.[1] This literature has grown exponentially in the quarter century since the phrase “international regimes” was coined.[2] Yet fundamental questions remain unanswered or inadequately explained. This paper focuses on two such questions. First, how do interactions between regimes affect their development? I suggest an answer, derived from sociological institutionalist theory and based on empirical research into recent nonproliferation export control cooperation. This answer also holds implications for a second gap in regime theory: explaining the development of issue-areas, to which regimes correspond.

In recent decades, multilateral export control regimes addressing nuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional technologies with weapons applications have come to interact amongst themselves with increasing regularity. This interaction has produced marked convergence in export control structures and processes across regimes and their member states. Rationalist explanations portray this convergence as driven by optimization to the most efficient means of export control. This account, however, is incomplete and only weakly supported by available evidence. A better explanation can be found in the concept of “organizational fields,” drawn from sociological institutionalism.

Within organizational fields—communities of related organizations—common practices are adopted across organizations based on conformity with legitimized standards rather than evidence of effectiveness. Multilateral export control, I will show, constitutes such an organizational field, and the process of institutional isomorphism by which standard practices are diffused within fields better accounts for convergence across export control regimes than do rationalist explanations. This suggests that cross-regime interactions can have profound effects on regime development and functioning.

Furthermore, interaction between the export control organizational field and the various export control regimes has also redefined the boundaries of the nonproliferation issue-area, suggesting a mechanism by which issue-areas, which define regime scope, can develop: Fields and issue-areas can coevolve. In the sections that follow, I address these gaps in extant regime theory by illustrating effects of cross-regime linkages in export control on issue-area development and regime dynamics.

In the first section, I describe recent developments in multilateral export control, and show why they are puzzling from a rationalist perspective and how they highlight gaps in theories of international regimes. I then outline an “organizational field” approach to this puzzle, and explain how it addresses both the empirical puzzle and gaps in regime theory regarding cross-regime linkages and issue-area development.

In the next section, I describe the emergence of an export control field among international regimes and their members in the nonproliferation issue-area. I show how the institutional character the organizational environment of export control regimes was conducive to the development of a field, and document the development of the field through regime membership growth and cross-regime organizational convergence. As a growing number of actors came to interact more routinely and intensively, standard processes and structures diffused through the field based on their legitimacy-conferring properties rather than their efficiency. The next section explains the mechanisms by which the export control field developed. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this model for our understanding of international regimes, issue-areas, and international cooperation.

Section I: Competing Perspectives on Export Control

a. The Empirical Puzzle

The first multilateral export control regime, the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Control (CoCom), was established by Western states in 1949-50 to coordinate controls on trade with the Soviet Union.[3] An East-West trade regime rather than a nonproliferation regime, CoCom remained the sole international export control organization until the establishment of the Zangger Committee and Nuclear Suppliers Group in the 1970s. The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw a burst of activity in multilateral export control, with the establishment of new regimes to address chemical and biological weapons (the Australia Group), ballistic missile technology (the Missile Technology Control Regime), an EU dual-use technology control system, and a nonproliferation-oriented replacement for CoCom (the Wassenaar Arrangement). In addition, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was revived in 1991, after having been dormant since 1978.

This broader range of cooperation was matched by striking levels of organizational convergence across both regimes and export control agencies of member states, especially in the 1990s.[4] Regimes have converged in both membership and in their structures and processes. National control systems have increasingly adopted standardized practices.

Figure 1 demonstrates that the membership of the various regimes became increasingly congruent throughout the 1990s.

AG: Australia Group

CoCom: Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls

EU: European Union Community Regime for Dual-Use Export Controls

MTCR: Missile Technology Control Regime

NSG: Nuclear Suppliers Group

WA: Wassenaar Arrangement

Zangger: Zangger Committee

Sources: Sipri Yearbook and (various years)

Of the 41 states that are members of at least one of the five main control regimes, 26 are members of all.[5] Of the remaining 15 states, 8 are members of at least 3 regimes.[6] Moreover, while data is spotty, evidence suggests that the structures and procedures of member states’ national export control systems have increasingly converged on a common standard. The following data, compiled by the Center for International Trade and Security, demonstrates increased congruence of national export control systems of four former Soviet states with an ideal score representing an international standard.[7]

Table 1.Longitudinal Evaluation of Export Control Development in Belarus, Kazakstan, Russia, and Ukraine (percent of ideal score)

1992 / 1994 / 1996
Belarus / 32.5 / 76.4 / 81.3
Kazakstan / 29.5 / 38.6 / 67.6
Russia / 40.4 / 70.5 / 83.0
Ukraine / 39.5 / 69.0 / 77.8

Source: Craft and Grillot 1997, 14.

Structural and procedural convergence is exemplified by the diffusion of so-called catch-all clauses. These clauses, which originated as a rule in the 1991 U.S. Enhanced Proliferation Control Initiative (EPCI), were rapidly adopted by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), EU system, and in national regulations of states such as Russia.[8] Regimes such as the MTCR and NSG, which had been limited to controlling technologies related to the production and delivery of nuclear weapons, extended their controls to cover non-nuclear payloads (in the MTCR’s case) and dual-use technologies (in the NSG’s), thereby conforming more closely to the other regimes. In the 1990s, the NSG, AG, MTCR, and Wassenaar Arrangement all adopted variants of “no undercut” rules preventing members from allowing export licenses refused by another member.

Mainstream theories of international relations—realism and neoliberalism—explain development in export control cooperation as the product of rational, interest-driven behavior.[9] The creation of new regimes and membership growth of existing regimes is explained as a response to a perceived increase in proliferation threats, or to provision of side-payments. And the standardization of organizational form and procedures is explained as driven by optimization: agencies and regimes converge on the most efficient methods of export control. Empirical evidence discussed below provides only mixed support for these claims. Though more incomplete than wrong, these explanations are ultimately unsatisfactory.

First, converging export control practices do not appear to be driven by a common perception of an increased proliferation threat. Common threat perception should produce agreement on items to be controlled and targets to be proscribed. National control lists, however, vary significantly, and states’ decisions to join regimes often seem driven by considerations other than security threats.[10] The efficiency-driven convergence thesis is further weakened by the near absence of evidence that standard practices are, in fact, more efficient than alternatives. (More on this below.) Finally, the claim is counterintuitive. It’s not clear why the same methods would be most efficient for the different tasks undertaken by the different regimes. It is a very different thing to control the export of a chemical with commercial application than to limit transfer of complete weapons systems or production facilities. One would expect different methods to be appropriate for each task. Thus, rationalist explanations are, at best, incomplete.

An alternative explanation, based on constructivist theory, holds that states develop national export control systems meeting international standards, and join multilateral regimes, due to their identification with the liberal international community. Empirical research has found mixed support for this “liberal identity” explanation, and its explanatory power seems to vary over time and across countries.[11] However, national identity does not, in any case, explain the content of the standard practices adopted by states. Even if the adoption of certain export control practices is norm-driven, how do those particular practices acquire this normative sanction?

Organizational field theory was developed to explain precisely the sort of puzzle presented here: the diffusion across organizations of practices and structures only loosely coupled to efficiency criteria. Field theory, a branch of sociological institutionalism, explains the process by which these organizational features acquire legitimacy and become widely adopted. Field theory is particularly well suited to the study of the export control developments discussed above for two reasons. First, it is a research program focused on just the kinds of interorganizational processes encountered in cross-regime interactions such as those among export control organizations. Also, field theory focuses on cognitive and intersubjective aspects of organizational environments. And it is in intersubjectively constituted aspects of these environments—issue areas and organizational fields—that conventional regime theory exhibits gaps.

b. Gaps in the Regimes Literature

Regime theory is seriously underdeveloped in its understanding of the effects of cross-regime linkages and the origins of issue-areas. As one recent review asserts,

For the most part, analyses of international regimes have focused on individual arrangements on the assumption that they are self-contained or stand-alone institutions to be studied in isolation from one another…Yet it is apparent that institutional linkages are widespread—and becoming more so—in international society.[12]

Regimes do not exist in isolation. In an increasingly institutionalized international society, regimes routinely interact with other regimes, and are affected by each other’s activities. Such cross-regime interactions have received little scholarly attention, and their consequences are poorly understood. Recognizing this, Oran Young and others have recently called for greater attention to such institutional linkages across regimes.[13]

Regime theory’s lack of an account of issue-area development is particularly serious given the fact that the concept of issue-area is a central element in the conventional definition of regimes: “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area.”[14] While the existence of an issue-area is a precondition to regime creation, we know little about the processes by which issue-areas emerge, or what implications this may hold for regime formation. Noting this gap, a leading scholar of international relations has observed that “[T]he way in which issues become aggregated into an issue-area has to become an explicit part of regime analysis.”[15]

Thinking of cross-regime interactions in terms of organizational fields links the two problems, showing how cross-regime linkages and issue-area evolution are related phenomena.[16] Through the development of an organizational field the one can, in fact, produce the other.

c. Rationalist Explanations of Export Control Cooperation

Rationalist theories provide less complete explanations of the extension and convergence of export control regime activity.[17] Such explanations—both realist and rational institutionalist—account for increased cooperation primarily as a response to perceived increased common proliferation threats, and explain convergence as optimization to the most efficient means of control. Several recent export control efforts have, indeed, been responses to the development or use of WMD in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And export control agencies do try to determine more effective means of controls.

However, this account is difficult to reconcile with several other observations. If increased export control cooperation in the 1980s and 1990s were a result of a common perception of increased threat, one would expect greater uniformity of national control lists. Yet significant variation persists in items controlled and targets proscribed. Differences in the 1990s between the U.S. and its allies over using sanctions against “rogue” states have reflected disagreement not only over the efficacy of sanctions but also over the degree of threat posed by potential proliferators. It is in the form, more than the content, of national and multilateral control systems that convergence has occurred.

Much recent export control cooperation seems driven by factors other than security threats.[18] The two main alternatives to security threats proposed as motives for adhering to international export control standards are side-payments and identity. States may develop national control systems and seek to join regimes in order to obtain rewards both tangible—access to markets and technology—and intangible. The latter motivation was described in several interviews with U.S. officials as the desire (particularly on the part of former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states) to “join the club” and be accepted as legitimate members of the Western international community.[19] These explanations for increased cooperation better account for recent trends. States are certainly motivated by the economic benefits of greater access to Western technologies and markets that can come from being a participant in, rather than target of, export control cooperation. This side-payment explanation, derived from rational institutionalism, is certainly part of the explanation. U.S. officials involved with efforts to improve control systems in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, however, generally judged norms and identity—the desire to “join the club”—to be equally or more important than economic motivations in the decisions of these states to develop international standard control systems. While these factors, highlighted by neoliberal and constructivist theories, largely explain the increased export control cooperation of the 1990s, it is unclear that they would have translated into such extensive growth in regime membership and participation without the prior development of the export control field. States have been brought into the regimes largely through field-constructing outreach activities such as seminars and exchanges conducted by regimes and member states. In any case, side-payments and identity factors do not explain the convergence of national and multilateral export control practices.

Rationalist accounts see this convergence as the result of national agencies and regimes recognizing and adopting the most efficient means of implementing controls. This explanation, while initially plausible and intuitively satisfying, is surprisingly weak. An efficiency-driven convergence explanation leads us to expect to find evidence that the practices adopted are, in fact, more efficient than alternatives. Not only is such evidence lacking, but the difficulty of determining the relative efficiency of alternative practices is sufficient to insulate export control organizations from such technical criteria. In such an institutional environment, organizational convergence is better explained as in large part a result of the copying of legitimized models under conditions of uncertainty. This mechanism, derived from organizational field theory, is generally consistent with rationalist expectations. Thus, institutionalist and rationalist explanations in this case are not mutually exclusive but complementary. However, the rationalist explanation alone is incomplete, failing to explain how certain practices rather than others become legitimized and diffused. Institutionalism, by placing the question in the context of institutional isomorphism within an organizational field, offers a more complete account of recent export control convergence, and identifies mechanisms to explain it.

d. Organizational Fields

The standard definition of an organizational field is “Those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products.”[20] This definition reflects the concept’s origins in the study of industrial sectors. However, the field concept is broader than that. More generally, “The notion of field connotes the existence of a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside of the field.”[21] The term is meant to “signify both common purpose and an arena of strategy and conflict."[22] The concept is flexible as "A field is always an analytical construct and how one defines it depends upon the phenomena in which one is interested."[23] Organizational field theory developed within the institutionalist branch of sociological organization theory, which focuses on the social and intersubjective aspects of organizational environments.[24] As a prominent institutionalist explains,

Institutional theory emphasizes that organizations are open systems—strongly influenced by their environments—but that it is not only rational or efficiency-based forces that are at work. Socially constructed belief systems and normative rules exercise enormous control over organizations—both how they are structured and how they carry out their work.[25]

Organizational field theory, then, centers on explaining convergence of organizational form and practice as the consequence of institutional, legitimacy-driven isomorphism within an organizational field. Applied to international cooperation, this explanation suggests improvements to theories of international regimes by specifying ways in which institutional linkages can produce changes in regimes, and how this process can redefine issue-areas.