Social policy in general has been and still is considered mainly as an issue of collective and corporative actors organised at a national level. This holds for systems of health care, unemployment insurance or pension funds.

Concerning labour regulation there is a longer tradition of supranational and global regulations, as the examples of ILO regulations or OECD standards reveal. Nevertheless, compared to the actual degree of globalised and transnationalised social relations and interchanges of goods, information, cognitive maps and persons, the development of coordinated cross-border social policies remains quite "underdeveloped".

Based on empirical research about transnational (expert) mobility in organisations and the emerging texture of transnational labour regulation and referring to theories of global "institutional work" (W. Mayer, T. Lawrence/R. Suddaby) the presentation argues that there could be identified a transnational institution building of social policy in the field of labour regulation that differs significantly from classic forms of social policy. In order to actually "realize" these empirical tendencies, we have to fine-tune our theoretical-conceptual lenses.