Corporations as Partners: “Connected Capitalism” and The Coca‐Cola Company

Abstract

For‐profit corporations increasingly promote themselves as potential partners with government (state actors) and community (NGOs and civil society groups) in addressing social problems. These partnerships enact what the former CEO of The Coca‐Cola Company, Neville Isdell, calls “connected capitalism”—collaborations in which businesses must do good in order to maximize shareholder value. How should we understand the self‐qualification of corporations as responsible partners and thus the corporate rejection of Milton Friedman's famous claim that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits? I address the question by considering how the partnerships currently advocated by The Coca‐Cola Company enhance the value of corporate‐owned brands and deflect criticism of business operations. I argue that these partnerships perform what Garsten and Jacobsson call “post‐political governance” in which cooperation with business displaces regulation of business by government. I argue furthermore that these partnerships represent what Nader calls “harmony ideology,” in which the concern for polite consensus displaces any interest in addressing social inequality.

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 — 48 citations exist upstream.

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