ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that corporations have significant influence on global politics. However, while much has been written about the role of corporations in national politics, which has identified the mechanisms by which commercial interests are articulated and furthered in states’ internal political processes, there has been much less interest in exploring this issue in detail at the global level. Indeed, while much of the literature on the global political economy seeks to develop a position that regards corporations as being major sites of political power, and often then constructs a critique of such power, the analysis of any pervasive business interest is more often asserted and assumed rather than fully addressed analytically (May 2006). Authors such as John Pilger (2003: 17–47) have examined specific and worrying examples of corporations’ political influence (in Pilger’s account, their role in Indonesia), but have focused on corruption and covert pressure rather than more formal and legitimate modes of influence. However, these cases of unacceptable and illegal behavior are then, in the protest literature, generalized as the mode by which corporations have an undue influence on weakened or corrupt states, as well as on more developed countries’ governments. Other popular analyses have focused on secret groups of corporate leaders (Ronson 2001) who seek to influence and corrupt policy makers, or have sought to assert that corporations have too close a relationship with our leaders (Hertz 2001) and therefore bypass democratic modes of accountability. This literature, and the campaigning materials it has spawned, sees corporations’ behavior as intrinsically corrupting and illegitimate. It suggests that well-documented cases of corporate wrongdoing are merely the tip of the iceberg, generating considerable hyperbole but little extra knowledge of the more general and ongoing modes by which the interests of business are articulated within global mechanisms of governance.
