Politics and the Corporation (Research in Political Sociology, 14)

This volume focuses on the ways in which corporations exercise political power, and how changes in the political-legal arrangements in which corporations are embedded affect their organizational behavior. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, the articles in this collection further our understanding of political capitalism, the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security in the economy and to preserve the social relations in capitalist society. Corporations exercise political and economic power to establish public policies that facilitate rationalization of the economy: creating the political, economic and ideological conditions that are intended to advance their capital accumulation agendas. By examining the historical and dialectical relationship between the corporation and the state, the authors identify conditions within which capitalists mobilize politically to define and redefine the institutional arrangement in which they are embedded. However, the capitalist class and corporate management do not always have a coherent conception of the relationships between their economic goals and the means necessary to achieve those goals. Thus, in addition to the intended consequences of corporate political mobilization, these articles show that rationalization is a historical process that is characterized by contradictions and unintended consequences.