Berle and Means revisited: The governance and power of large U.S. corporations

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), Berle and Means warned of the concentration of economic power brought on by the rise of the large corporation and the emergence of a powerful class of professional managers, insulated from the pressure not only of stockholders, but of the larger public as well. In the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Berle and Means warned that the ascendance of management control and unchecked corporate power had potentially serious consequences for the democratic character of the United States. Social scientists who drew on Berle and Means in subsequent decades presented a far more benign interpretation of the rise of managerialism, however. For them, the separation of ownership from control actually led to an increased level of democratization in the society as a whole. Beginning in the late 1960s, sociologists and other social scientists rekindled the debate over ownership and control, culminating in a series of rigorous empirical studies on the nature of corporate power in American society. In recent years, however, sociologists have largely abandoned the topic, ceding it to finance economists, legal scholars, and corporate strategy researchers. In this article, I provide a brief history of the sociological and finance/legal/strategy debates over corporate ownership and control. I discuss some of the similarities between the two streams of thought, and I discuss the reasons that the issue was of such significance sociologically. I then argue that by neglecting this topic in recent years, sociologists have failed to contribute to an understanding of some of the key issues in contemporary business behavior. I provide brief reviews of four loosely developed current perspectives and then present an argument of my own about the changing nature of the U.S. corporate elite over the past three decades. I conclude with a call for sociologists to refocus their attention on an issue that, however fruitfully handled by scholars in other fields, cries out for sociological analysis.     

Assessing corporate planning of future sustainability initiatives in private healthcare organizations

PurposeThe research objective is to assess the corporate planning of future sustainability initiatives in private healthcare organizations.Design/methodology/approachPrivate hospital organizations have been selected using a judgmental sampling. A qualitative case study was followed in this research.FindingsThe findings shed light on corporate planning of future sustainability initiatives in private healthcare organizations.Research limitations/implicationsThe diversity of similarities and differences that has been uncovered between private healthcare organizations on corporate planning, reveals the complexity faced in trying to achieve sector-wide and or industry-wide uniformity of sustainability initiatives.Managerial implicationsThese findings offer opportunities to examine criteria to examine the corporate planning of future efforts and priorities in private healthcare sectors across countries and continents.Originality/valueThis paper distinguishes between corporate planning approaches in relation to the assessment criteria to examine future sustainability initiatives in private hospitals.     

Managerial power in the German model: the case of Bertelsmann and the antecedents of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Our article extends research on authoritarian neoliberalism to Germany, through a history of the Bertelsmann media corporation – sponsor and namesake of Germany’s most influential neoliberal think-tank. Our article makes three moves. Firstly, we argue that conceptualizing German neoliberalism in terms of an ‘ordoliberal paradigm’ is of limited use in explaining the rise and fall of Germany’s distinctive socio-economic model (Modell Deutschland). Instead, we locate the origins of authoritarian tendencies in the corporate power exercised by managers rather than in the power of state-backed markets imagined by ordoliberals. Secondly, we focus on the managerial innovations of Bertelsmann as a key actor enmeshed with Modell Deutschland. We show that the adaptation of business management practices of an endogenous ‘Cologne School’ empowered Bertelsmann’s postwar managers to overcome existential crises and financial constraints despite being excluded from Germany’s corporate support network. Thirdly, we argue that their further development in the 1970s also enabled Bertelsmann to curtail and circumvent the forms of labour representation associated with Modell Deutschland. Inspired by cybernetic management theories that it used to limit and control rather than revive market competition among its workforce, Bertelsmann began to act and think outside the postwar settlement between capital and labour before the settlement’s hotly-debated demise since the 1990s.     

The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms

ABSTRACT

This article reflects the kinds of situations and spaces where people and algorithms meet. In what situations do people become aware of algorithms? How do they experience and make sense of these algorithms, given their often hidden and invisible nature? To what extent does an awareness of algorithms affect people's use of these platforms, if at all? To help answer these questions, this article examines people's personal stories about the Facebook algorithm through tweets and interviews with 25 ordinary users. To understand the spaces where people and algorithms meet, this article develops the notion of the algorithmic imaginary. It is argued that the algorithmic imaginary – ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be and how they function – is not just productive of different moods and sensations but plays a generative role in moulding the Facebook algorithm itself. Examining how algorithms make people feel, then, seems crucial if we want to understand their social power.     

Some reflections on contemporary writing in the indigenous languages of America

Abstract

This article surveys recent literatures in the indigenous languages of Latin America. The past decade has witnessed a continent-wide rise in indigenous-language publications – a rise calling for a reevaluation of the critical state of indigenous rights and language policies that was expressed in the context of protests around the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus' 'discovery' of the Americas. The new wave of indigenous literatures has arisen in the wake of dramatic acts of violence, such as military repression and neoliberal economic restructuring. However, the large-scale displacement of indigenous peoples that has resulted from these processes has also provoked a desire among indigenous writers to utilize print media in order to preserve knowledge and communal memory. Drawing on specific examples from contemporary indigenous poetry of Peru and Mexico, the article argues that indigenous literature challenges conceptions of indigenous expressive culture as inherently oral, traditional, rural, and communitarian.     

A shift in Western development agency thinking? The case for second best

This review essay illustrates a turn in Western development agency thinking in two recent publications intended for development agencies and African “reformers,” by authors with long careers in Western development institutions. Both publications explicitly reject – at least for the short to medium term – a comprehensive “good governance” approach to development. Subsequently, a publication entitled Violence and Social Orders, authored by three American scholars with an interest in the role of institutions in historical change, is reviewed since it is a crucial influence in the consolidation of this turn in thinking. This new Western approach is more restrained in its ambition to introduce new governance institutions in the developing world. This implies that it is prepared to tolerate what it considers to be imperfections in both the state and the market, viewing these as a second best result (in the short to medium term) in exchange for greater chances of realising positive development outcomes over the long term.     

9-11 and Its Anxious Phantoms

Abstract

“Metaphysical mutations – that is to say, global transformation in the values to which the majority subscribe – are rare in the history of humanity. The rise of Christianity might be cited as an example.

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably toward its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress – nothing except another metaphysical mutation.”     

An Overview and Comments on Recent Americans With Disabilities Act Court Rulings

Abstract

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) is designed to protect persons with disabilities from discrimination in nearly every aspect of American life. This commentary focuses on a number of recent United States Supreme Court decisions that help to clarify the intent of the ADA. It is critical for social workers to be aware of these recent court rulings because they affect social work practice and have important policy implications.     

Boundaries Exercise Power: Comparing Culture in the Keweenaw and Nickel Belt

Abstract

Examination of the Keweenaw peninsula, Michigan, and the Sudbury Basin, Ontario, offers an opportunity to assess the impact of the Canadian-American border. Both sites hosted various cultural activities shaped by ethnic heterogeneity, corporate influence, cultural elements challenging corporate influence, and isolation from major centres. Popular culture, in both cases, included standard spiritual and political institutions, music, dance, writing, and a growing sentiment of being ‘northern’. Examining these two northern, resource-industrial hinterlands reveals parallel roles as outliers of established culture and inflectors as outliers. This case study also examines linkages between two nations sharing a long boundary.     

Centring labour in financialization

ABSTRACT

This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of labour and finance that are (1) unidirectional and (2) that often lump a wide range of developments under a single heading without considering how these trends might intersect in potentially contradictory ways. Marx offers a useful alternative insofar as his approach to money and finance centres on a continual and fraught dynamic between the ‘abstract’ social labour embodied in money and the ‘concrete’ labour performed in particular places at particular times. This argument is illustrated through brief vignettes from South Africa.     

The Profession: Comments from an Interactionist's Perspective

Abstract

The paper focuses on the structure and process of the public and private institutional regulation of race relations. This theoretical analysis posits that the public and private sectors are governed by public and private governments. The analysis reveals that the governance of race relations has shifted from the public to the private corporate bureaucracies. In that shift from the public to private governance, blacks continue to be discriminated against as a political class and for that reason they continue to make group claims and seek group remedies through enabling legislation and Affirmative Action programs.     

Bringing about social justice through feminist research for monitoring,evaluation, and learning? A conversation from Oxfam GB

ABSTRACT

At Oxfam, we have spent much of the last two years talking about feminist principles. In the context of the #Metoo and #Aidtoo movements, the presence (or absence) of these feminist values and principles is increasingly – and rightly – under the spotlight. In this article, we reflect on what it takes to embed these values in our research practice within the monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) function of an international non-government organisation such as Oxfam. These values shape our understanding of the purpose of carrying out MEL activities as a tool for bringing about social justice, through examining gender and power relations, why they exist and how they change. We reflect on the successes and challenges we have faced while utilising evaluation for greater gender equality. By doing so, we aim to start shedding light on the structural changes needed to bring about social changes through MEL, and research more broadly.     

Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries

Abstract

This article investigates how globalization is affecting film industries in the USA and Asia. It argues that these industries are becoming more closely integrated with one another both materially and aesthetically, and that this in turn is leading to the denationalization of individual films and film industries on both sides of the Pacific. The article explores how globalization is experienced differently by different film industries – and by different sectors within individual industries – and how it entails both losses and opportunities for Asian film makers. Taking the contemporary Hollywood and East Asian martial arts film as an exemplary cultural style of globalization, it also looks at how integration involves both cultural homogenization and the production of difference. Specific topics discussed include the growth of Hollywood's Asian markets, Jackie Chan and the flow of Hong Kong talent into Hollywood, Hollywood remakes of South Korean movies, the resurgence of Asian film industries, Hollywood's local-language film production and Zhang Yimou's Hero.     

The transformative power of civil society in South Africa: an activist’s perspective on innovative forms of organizing and rights-based practices

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses recent campaigns to fulfil human rights to quality basic education and access to mental health care services, led by SECTION27, a social justice organization in South Africa. It investigates how these campaigns were able to impact on inequality in education and health care and the ways in which they mobilized and empowered communities to demand social justice and drive pro-poor transformation. In particular, it looks at the way SECTION27 used human rights law and the Courts to advance social justice. It records many positive outcomes. But concludes by asking whether, if inequality is enabled by elite power can it only be disabled by people’s power? How can civil society overcome fault-lines in its sustainability, representativity and power structure? It argues that civil society must do more to tackle the systems and not just scratch at the symptoms of a more and more unequal world.     

In the sovereign machine: sovereignty,governmentality, automaticity

Abstract

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical situation – whether it be rationality (Hobbes), bureaucratization (Weber), neutralization (Schmitt), historicism (Benjamin) or governmentality (Foucault) – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery (Aristotle, Hegel, Kojève, Agamben), puppets, automata or clockwork (Descartes, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida), lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault) and so on do not merely reflect but change our understanding of the causal relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, decision and norm, exception and rule. If the self-appointed task of the modern political theorist has so often been to obtain or regain sovereignty of, or over, the machine – to jam its gears – I seek to expose what the later Derrida calls the ‘machine’ of sovereignty itself. In conclusion, I argue that political theory’s attempt to reveal or retroactively invent the sovereign person at the heart of the machine only ends up revealing the sovereign machine at the heart of the person. What – if anything – is really inside the machine of sovereignty?     

The great trasformismo

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the commonalities and differences between Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci in their assessment of the origins of fascism as located within the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and its structural impasse in the twentieth century. Specifically, the aim is to trace a set of associations between Polanyi and Gramsci on the transformations wrought across the states-system of Europe prior to the crises that engulfed capitalism leading to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. Focusing on the class structures that emerged out of the expansion of capitalism across Europe in the nineteenth century reveals that there was less a ‘great transformation’ in terms of a rupture with the past through the rise of liberal capitalism. Rather, there was more a slow and protracted process of class restoration known as passive revolution, or a ‘Great Trasformismo’, referring to the molecular absorption of class contradictions marking the consolidation and expansion of capitalist social relations. In sum, it is argued that The Great Transformation is understood better if read through the epoch of passive revolution, or The Great Trasformismo, which entailed the restoration and maintenance of class dominance through state power. This approach therefore opens up questions, rather than forecloses answers, about the historical geographies constituting the spaces and places of the political economy of modern capitalism.     

The Shape of Queer

ABSTRACT

The rise of queer theory and activism have posed problems of identity and of goals. Queer theory has problemaiized identity, including queer identity: who or what is queer? Queer activism, on the other hand, has been fraught with those challenging sexual boundaries and those for whom “queer” is just the new name for gays and lesbians. Many of these latter activists reject earlier politics, and are in danger of returning to interest-group liberalism as a result. This paper sketches these problems and argues that wholesale rejection of lesbian-feminism and gay liberation is a mistake. The broader vision of these movements offers the possibility of articulation with other movements for change, and this possibility must be renewed and rethought.     

Monogamy on trial

A discussion of the origins and subsequent developments of attitudes toward monogamy and its alternatives reveals marked variations and some similarities. A range of specific factors have impinged upon norms of intimacy in various historical periods, e.g., the Medieval Church stressed the ideal of celibacy and derogated monogamy. While external factors such as economics and religion tend to influence lifestyle preferences to produce noncumulative effects, there has been a more recent tendency toward democratization of options. Those patterns most closely associated with elite populations tend to be eventually adopted in an altered fashion by broader sectors of the populace. Author's Note: Special appreciation is due Ms. Molly Laird. Her constructive assistance has been a major factor in the preparation of this article. The chart which appears as Figure 1 is her reconstruction of salient elements contained within the body of the paper.     

News and corporate reputation: Empirical findings from the Netherlands

This article examines the influence of business news on corporate reputation. A panel survey was used to measure the reputations of six companies and two professional sectors. Media coverage was analyzed by focusing on the tone of two different types of news. News about the successes of the companies – such as higher profits – improved their reputations. In addition, some companies’ reputation improved the more they were criticized by their competitors in the news. It is argued on basis of these empirical findings that the reputation of the party attacking a company in the news is crucial in determining its influence on the reputation of the besieged company.     

The global corporate elite after the financial crisis: evidence from the transnational network of interlocking directorates

What impact did the recent financial crisis have on the corporate elite's international network? Has corporate governance taken on an essentially national structure or have transnational networks remained robust? We investigate this issue by comparing the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy in 1976, 1996, 2006 and 2013. We find that corporate elites have not retrenched into their national business communities: the transnational network increased in relative importance and remained largely intact during the crisis lasting from 2006 to 2013. However, this network does not depend – as it used to do – on a small number of big linkers but on a growing number of single linkers. The network has become less hierarchical. As a group, the corporate elite has become more transnational in character. We see this as indicative of a recomposition of the corporate elite from a national to a transnational orientation.