Abstract
The global financial crisis of 2008, its following bank bailouts, and associated corporate impunity sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the structural power of business and the question of who rules? in capitalist societies. This new wave of scholarship mitigated some of the problems of the original, theory-driven discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. But despite significant advancements in the empirical identification of business power, we lack a unified framework for studying its working mechanisms. So-called hybrid approaches, drawing on instrumental and structural power for their analyses, display high potential for such a unified and easily applicable framework. We build on this hybrid tradition and propose a novel model that integrates instrumental and structural power analysis into a basic framework. With this, we recalibrate the often rigid division between instrumental and structural power forms and emphasize the role of perceptions as key for understanding the dynamics of business power over time. We illustrate this parsimonious framework by an analysis of the plans of the Dutch government to abolish a dividend tax in 2018 that would have benefited a number of large multinationals but collapsed before implementation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 133-150 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Business and Politics |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:‡We dedicate this paper to Meindert Fennema and Eelke Heemskerk, mentors and friends, and the whole CORPNET project. We thank Jan Fichtner, Eelke Heemskerk, Wouter Schakel, Herman Mark Schwartz, Frank Takes, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on previous versions of this article. We also express our gratitude to the organizers and participants of the panels “Network Analysis, Complex Interdependence, and Structural Power in the Global Political Economy” at the ISA 2018 in San Francisco and “States of Capital” at the IIPPE conference 2019 in Lille as well as the Political Economy Working Group at the EUI Florence, where this paper was presented. MB, JGB, and DV have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement number 638946). MB has received further funding from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement number 758430).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of V.K. Aggarwal.
Keywords
- business power
- instrumental power
- political economy
- structural power
- tax