A Sociological Framework for Corporate Political Action: Towards a Reflexive Conceptualisation of the Corporation as an Actor in World Politics

In the new reality of the twenty-first century the conventional conceptual differences between economic and political action, between the private and public sphere, are at best diminishing and at worst nonexistent. As recent examples, such as the Murdoch scandal or the BP and Deep Water Horizon oil spill, have demonstrated impressively, corporations are not only increasingly perceived as powerful and dangerous agents, but are also, indicated by numerous public-private partnerships or the emergence of private authority, engaged in a variety of political activities. This development calls on political scientists to question existing theoretical frameworks for conceptualising the corporation as an actor in world politics and thus reflecting on the implications for power, order and legitimacy on the global scale. Reviewing the literature it becomes evident that conventional approaches mainly remain limited to interest- or norm-based theoretical frameworks, thus neither reflecting on underlying assumptions nor fundamentally questioning the actor-image of the corporation. The paper argues that in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of business actors in today’s world politics the researcher has to engage closely and in detail with the actual political practices of corporate representatives in new institutional arrangements on the global scale. This paper aims i) to state the case for a reflexive approach towards business actors based on the sociological concepts elaborate by Pierre Bourdieu and ii) introduce empirical findings regarding the political practice of corporate representatives.