ABSTRACT
This chapter asks whether the study of the corporation can enrich critical resource geography (CRG) and, conversely, the ways in which CRG can contribute to our understanding of contemporary capitalism as dominated by multinational corporations. It starts by setting out some contours of the corporation—and the business “firm” more broadly—as a powerful political-economic actor pulled by the tendency to the concentration of capital. It then situates the corporation in capitalism, pointing to Marx's method as a way to do so, before returning to the corporation as an actor situated in the hierarchical context of interfirm relations in global value chains and production networks. The underlying argument is that in taking the firm more seriously as a differentiated object of study, as “classes of capital” and as political-economic agents, CRG can better understand capitalist strategies in the transformation of nature by labor into commodities—“extractive natures”—and, in turn, the (re)production of natural resource industries and the landscapes which they inhabit. Conversely, those interested in the critical study of the corporation can learn a great deal from CRG including its emphasis on landscapes, materiality, and the social construction of “resources.”
