This chapter sets out to do two things: to discuss international standards as a form of soft law and to demonstrate the usefulness of organization theory in doing so. International standards have received substantial scholarly attention during the last 20 years, but they have rarely been discussed as a kind of soft law, despite how well they fit the definition. Using insights from organization studies where scholars long have been theorizing about standards, we show how standards tend to dilute responsibility. Standards have a tendency to generate more organization and instead of clarifying or concentrating responsibility, it seems difficult to find anyone responsible in a world of standards. Discussing standards as an example of soft law, the framework for responsibility dilution presented in the chapter speaks to scholars also outside the realm of standard studies specifically.

As the world becomes more and more organized, it seems ever more difficult to find anyone responsible. Why is that? We argue that the extensive external organization of organizations in contemporary society provides the key. Formal organizations are collective orders with great potential for concentrating responsibility on top managers and the organization. But when they are organized by other organizations, this potential is undermined, and responsibility becomes diluted rather than concentrated. We explain this outcome by analysing the communication of decisions as a main producer of responsibility and by defining organization as a decided order. Our analysis draws upon and contributes to research about partial organization, but it also contributes to literatures on global governance and organizational institutionalism.

Partial organization is a neat theoretical solution: it broadens the scope outside the formal organization and distinguishes between the organized and the non-decided. The purpose of this paper is to make a first, conceptual step towards exploring the drivers of partial organization and its expansion. We put partial organization in dialogue with other organizational theories and outline three different theoretical ways to explain why partial organization expands. First, the elaboration of organizational actorhood results in expanded partial organization. Second, new forms of organization, which deviate from the standard model of centralized organization, drive partial organization. And third, decided orders outside organizations perpetually expand, because they are based on decisions. Partial organization consequently expands for different reasons, but attention is focused on organizational expansion that satisfies Western principles, such as liberalisms and democracy. The theory of partial organization, however, would give us the tools to likewise analyze equally coercive sanctioning or power-laden hierarchies and to fully grasp organizational expansion. Mobilizing the lens of partial organization across Western contexts could bring the benefit of discovering cultural features and differences of organization, which in turn will increase the explanatory power of partial organization. 

Why does organization happen and why does organization expand? We discuss these questions by examining how a fairly simple form of organization in the form of standards expanded and finally led to the emergence of two global macro-organizations in the fields of management and sustainability. We find four ways by which organization expanded in these cases and we analyze the arguments for expansion used by the organizers. We argue that the search for trust, transparency, independence and impartiality can be significant drivers of organization.

In this chapter we investigate how certification and accreditation organizations put much effort in constructing an image of independence for the outside world to see and endorse. It is difficult for an organization to proclaim its own independence; rather, a fundamental way of convincing others of its independence is through entering dependency relationships with other formal organizations that grant the organization independence, like the dubbing of knights. We analyse the character of organizational dependencies with respect to rules, sanctions, hierarchy, monitoring, and membership and conclude that the search for independence result in the addition of elements to elements, driving more and more organization. We discuss how the adding of elements form a complex system of interdependent organizations, which resembles a rational, authoritative Weberian bureaucracy. Although this bureaucratic system may be understood as organization – a decided and systematized order – it is not a discernible entity. It is partial and as such it lacks a central authority to govern and to which an overall responsibility could be ascribed. Paradoxically, the efforts aiming at ensuring independence resulted in the organizations becoming dependent not only on each other, but also on the decided order surrounding them.