Corporations in World Politics

Abstract

In International Relations today, a consensus on the role of private business has emerged: corporations are understood as relevant actors in world politics due to processes of globalisation. As state capacities to fulfil central governance tasks diminish, private business actors gain in political power and influence. Following this consensus, Constructivist and Business Ethics literature call for re-theorising business actors as political actors in a world of global governance. Reproducing the public/private dichotomy as well as implicit actor assumptions, global governance research often analyses the establishment and the effects of new institutional arrangements based on a conventional modelling of the corporation as a rational, profit-maximising and unitary actor. Assessing the role of corporations in world politics is thus more often than not driven by normative ideas that business actors can/will become responsible actors while not so much concerned with empirical evidence on the level of individual corporations or critical reflection on the assumptions underlying the corporate actor image. The idea of the panel is to discuss theoretical and empirical approaches on corporations in world politics which draw on different methodological and theoretical perspectives but share the view that research should be concerned with private business as actors in their own right. While one can see many new forms of governance arrangements involving corporate participation, the papers look at the political integration of private business as an ambiguous and complex process in which conflicts, uncertainty and indeterminacy prevail. The panel aims at contributing to a more accentuated picture of what constitutes corporations in world politics today.

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