Abstract
AbstractIn most accounts of global governance, where corporations are included, they are seen as either subject to various international organisations’ regulatory impact or are identified as having (benign or malign) influence over agenda setting around the scope and practices of global regulation. However, here I examine a third dimension that has hitherto been under recognised: this article starts to develop an analysis of the terrain that global corporations govern themselves, sometime singularly, sometimes collectively and sometimes collaborating with the more “normal” institutions of global governance. I seek to develop an account of how the corporation governs this terrain and the mechanisms that businesses have developed (or utilised) to maintain their authority. I suggest that it makes sense to understand global corporations as directly analogous to more “normal” institutions of global governance, and that discussion and analysis of global governance needs to integrate this third dimension if it is to examine the full spectrum of governance beyond the state. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to global governance.
Highlights
In this article I am not going to discuss how various corporations have shaped the agenda of particular institutions of global governance, nor am I going to set out the impact that globally focussed regulatory institutions have on particular business sectors or corporations
While the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and other organisations indicate there is a growing recognition in policy circles that improving the governance function of corporations can have beneficial effects across their supply networks, there has been less discussion of how this governance function might be best understood as a political economic issue, rather than merely a technical question of effective economic control
In Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s influential typology of forms of power in global governance we find various forms of power arrayed across four dimensions: compulsory; institutional; structural; and productive (Barnett and Duvall, 2005; see Lukes, 2005)
Summary
In this article I am not going to discuss how various corporations have shaped the agenda of particular institutions of global governance, nor am I going to set out the impact that globally focussed regulatory institutions have on particular business sectors or corporations. What follows is different from much discussion of (global) supply chains that focusses on their management,2 as it suggests there is a governance function being undertaken by corporations, which is characterised by explicit and implicit power relations, the technical management of efficiency in network interactions.
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