ABSTRACT
Except as it enters as a participant in the general political arena, the business firm has not been a focus of study for political scientists. Political scientists have generally defined their field in a relatively modest way, limiting their attention to phenomena that occur in, or in close conjunction with, explicitly governmental institutions. Except for a few attempts to define the field in terms of the study of power (or its variants), the major criterion for delimiting the field has been descriptive rather than analytic. By any reasonable descriptive definition of political science, the business firm is outside the domain. Similarly, economists have largely ignored political systems except as they impinge on the market. Although it is conventional for economists to identify their field in terms of an analytic definition (e.g., the study of the allocation of scarce resources), the vast bulk of economic research is linked to a descriptive definition of the field. For practical purposes, economics is the study of
1962] BusiNEss FIRM AS PoLITICAL CoALITION 663
markets. The main attention to politics comes as a side issue in the area of economic policy.
