Business Power and Business Conflict: A Neo-Pluralist Perspective

Abstract

Corporations are said to ‘rule the world’ (Korten, 1995). As economic globalization reduces barriers to global investment and trade, international business is gaining ground. Some analysts of International Political Economy (IPE) have deduced from this that business is becoming ever more powerful vis-à-vis civil society and at the cost of state autonomy. At the height of the globalization debate in the 1990s, ‘state retreat’ (Strange, 1996) and ‘power shift’ (Mathews, 1997) were popular images that seemed to capture this new global reality (see also Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994; Falk, 1997; Rosecrance, 1999). Not all were convinced by this ‘hyperglo-balist’ (Held et al., 1999) perspective, however. International Relations scholars rooted in the discipline’s statist tradition have long argued that states ultimately control multinational corporations (Gilpin, 1975), and that globalization has done little to undermine state power (Waltz, 2000). Most recently, Daniel Drezner reformulated this argument in the context of global regulatory politics, claiming that ‘the great powers … remain the primary actors writing the rules that regulate the global economy’ (2007: 5).