Theorizing the Power of Global Companies

Abstract

The power of business actors and its implications for democracy have been a concern since the advent of large enterprises in the nineteenth century. However, it is difficult to move from the vague feeling that huge corporations may be a problem for democratic politics to a more systematic and differentiated understanding of why and how that may be the case. Some observers have argued, for instance, that numbers such as the turnover, workforce, or market share of a company say little about whether and how economic power may be transformed into political power. One approach to an analysis of business's political power that provides answers to this question is to differentiate between various dimensions of business power, specifically business's instrumental, structural, and discursive power. These dimensions differ regarding the sources of power on which they draw, as well as the channels through which power is exercised. An additional advantage of such a differentiated approach is that it allows targeting measures aimed at guaranteeing a democratic balance of interests strategically at trouble spots. Therefore, this chapter introduces a three-dimensional perspective on business power, delineates some general developments in business power revealed by this perspective, and points out implications for political reforms in the interest of democratic legitimacy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.