ABSTRACT
What is the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in international affairs? This perennial question about one of the most complex categories of non-state actors has attracted major public and scholarly attention. However, it is difficult to answer this question satisfactorily, not least because the contributions of business to politics are multifaceted and because business is everything but a unitary actor. Thus there is a propensity to address this problem in relatively abstract terms of influence and, to varying degrees, to see a rather smooth transformation of economic power into political influence, in which the position of large companies in the economy makes an analysis of the organization of business and involvement in decision making redundant. The question is largely sidestepped in state-centred studies of international relations in which little room is left for the independent analysis of economic forces; in addition states are often seen as aggregating and representing business as a kind of supreme ‘national’ interest in various international domains. In these studies the level of analysis is in part shifted to domestic politics.
