ABSTRACT
Political scientists may well discover a fertile field for research in the phenomenal expansion of multinational business enterprise. This chapter identifies three issues that arise from the problem of corporate power in political theory with reference to pioneering works on corporate power in modern industrial society. The issues include economic oligarchy, managerial authority, and class formation. The idea casts doubt upon the separation of economic power from political power for analytical purposes, a presupposition that is widely accepted in standard political science. Corporate internationalism is a social movement and a rising class interest. With its advent as a major social force, the working classes of the world confront a corporate bourgeoisie in industrial capitalist countries, and a managerial bourgeoisie in newly developing countries. As a rule, those who conceive social class to be a function of property ownership have rejected the notion of a bureaucratic or managerial "class" in capitalist societies.
