Power Of Transnational Corporations Research Articles

In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century

In the past twenty-five years, the literature on consumption has gained analytic power by positioning itself against the consumer critics of the twentieth century (Veblen, Adorno and Horkheimer, Galbraith, Baudrillard), arguing that these accounts were totalizing, theorized consumers as too passive, and simplified motives. The literature moved to micro-level, interpretive studies that are often depoliticized and lack a critical approach to the subject matter. The author argues that developments such as the emergence of a global production system, ecological degradation, and new findings on well-being warrant a reengagement with the critical tradition and macro-level critiques. This article considers three traditions—Veblenian accounts of status seeking, the Frankfurt School, and Galbraith and the economic approach to consumer demand— arguing that the flaws of these models are not necessarily fatal and that the debate about producer versus consumer sovereignty should be revisited in light of the changing political power of transnational corporations.

Performing Power: The Deal, Corporate Rule, and the Constitution of Global Legal Order

This article presents a stylized account of legal work involved in doing a corporate deal transnationally, drawing inspiration from the work of American legal realist, Robert Hale. In so doing, it seeks to show that legal institutions on which transnational corporate power depends are far more plastic, discordant, and irresolute than commonly recorded. By tethering global legal order to the decisive interiority of the transnational corporation, while taking that interior for granted, recent accounts (such as those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri or A. Claire Cutler) may do more to fortify than query the contemporary ‘rule’ of global capital.

Reinvention and Globalization in Hughes's Stories

In short, there seems to be a powerful disjuncture between the global narratives and images that attract postcolonial critics and another set of narratives and images which do not exactly fit into a theoretical apparatus that seems bent on difference and hybridity. Postcolonial literature is not, of course, deaf to the disjuncture between its performance of a global culture and the persistence of this other, darker, older narrative of poverty, of failed nationalism, of death, that will simply not go away. Postcolonial theorists may have sought to forget the nation in order to become global, but the nation has not forgotten them. --Simon Gikandi By reconsidering the narrative posture of Langston Hughes, transnational readers may well perceive a negotiated balance through which his narrators provide the world a way out of global paradox. Reinvention of the communal perception is necessary because the dislocation of an African American on the Atlantic Ocean or in Havana requires adaptation of the explorer's internalized nation. Finally, the wanderer's homeland needs to readapt to the reinvention of what American really means. I propose that the emerging greatness of Langston Hughes was and remains the structuring of synchronic history and diachronic time within the immediate space of a narrative event. Langston Hughes reinvents an African American imagination at port in Senegal (The Little Virgin 1927) and re-adapts the international perspective to the reassessment of Civil Rights in Hopkinsville, Missouri (Home 1934). Given Hughes's well-known travel to France during 1922-23, it is not surprising that he was prepared to explore the historical locale of Cuba in 1934. (1) Often his forte was representing the vision of a Diaspora in French and Spanish as well as German. He represented African American voice to Africa and Europe, and then translated the transnationalized voice back to the Americas. Juxtaposing an early modern poet with a post-modern theory produces a kind of historical incongruity. James Langston Hughes emerged as a lively storyteller during the 1920s and 1930s, but the subsequent term of globalization has developed only since the 1970s. Often globalization involves an international traveler's willingness to adapt the cultured values and texts of one's native land to new ones. While such a process takes place within national discourses, its real mission is to dissolve them. Perhaps one could reassess the importance of stories by Langston Hughes by testing the assumptions of globalization in light of his implied concept of an internalized nation, while working one's way backwards through the global framework to a few lively moments in the texts. Langston Hughes emerges as an African American standard by which global theory should be reassessed. Globalization entails an international flow of capital along with a worldwide development in the new communications such as the telephone, fax, email, and internet. Leading the vanguard are such international corporations as Microsoft, Gateway, and McDonald's. According to Jackie Smith and Hank Johnson in Globalization and Resistance (2002), at least six compulsions to globalize emerge. First, a global era demands world responses because political policies have effects beyond nation states. Second, the expansion of new technologies such as satellite transmissions and internet shrink the distance between nations, collapsing them into a shared cyberspace. Third, the radically increasing power of transnational corporations (and I would add activist governments), that enables them to control the flow of raw materials (and fission materials for weapons and wealth) has outpaced the effectiveness of local and national movements to contain them. Fourth, today the environmental movement has become worldwide as was the peace movement in earlier decades. Fifth, the human rights movement, one so informed by racial and female liberation, assumes a global logic. …

Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women's Rights in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Cuánto falta en México para el pleno ejercicio de la democracia? . . . La clase gobernante desprecia lo que ve o cree ver: masas ingobernables por irredimibles, masas indóciles y sumisas, masas regidas por el complicado matrimonio entre la obedencia y el relajo. En el otro extremo, quienes ejercen la democracia desde abajo y sin pedir permiso, amplían sus derechos ejerciéndolos.1 —Carlos Monsiváis, Entrada Libre (1987) From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an "abstract" human being who seemed to exist nowhere . . . —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, is not New York, Tokyo, Paris, or even Mexico City. Nevertheless, it shares with these global cities all the markers of a denationalized metropolitan space where new forms of sociality emerge with the migration of people, goods, and capital across [End Page 255] national borders (Sassen 2001).2 Since the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, the city has contributed a vast supply of labor and resources to the reformation of industrial and financial capital. The information technologies that support the "global cultural economy" are made en masse in the city's maquiladoras by workers for whom consumption is only slightly less compulsory than their high levels of productivity (Appadurai 1996, 29). Decades before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico experimented with political projects that would suspend national sovereignty in the border space in favor of attracting foreign exchange.3 Following the crises of the mid-1980s, Mexico's neo-liberal program of economic privatization and deregulation entailed the wholesale conversion of the northern border into a platform for cheap labor and out-migration. The integration of world markets, the expansion of transnational corporate power, and the concurrent displacements of peoples from southern Mexico have, in their turn, produced urban forms in Ciudad Juárez bearing the distinct signature of globalization's restructuring of the nation-state. This article examines the troubling status of poor migrant women as political actors in the denationalized space of Ciudad Juárez. Subaltern women's labors have served the state as a stabilizing force amidst the economic and political crises of the neo-liberal regime in ways that both promote and delimit new forms of female agency in the border region. The acute rise in armed social conflict in Juárez, much of it targeted at young women and girls, requires that we examine how the denationalized subjectivity that has occupied recent scholarship on globalization and citizenship is itself produced through state failure and state violence. The impunity of violent crime necessarily devalues both citizenship and citizens: it produces a climate where sociality is defined less by national belonging than by the more atomizing force of collective fear.4 If globalization has in fact encouraged the disarticulation of citizenship rights from membership to a single national community, as many analysts maintain, it is nevertheless unclear whether subaltern Mexican women can make substantive claims to the global civil society that the Juárez industries have helped to produce. [End Page 256] Recent scholarship on citizenship contends that changes in the nation-state that result from several aspects of globalization "significantly alter those conditions that in the past fed the articulation between citizenship and the nation-state" (Sassen 2003, 41).5 Saskia Sassen writes that the processes of market integration, coupled with the expansion of the international human rights regime, enabled the "deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities," just as they "have directly and indirectly altered particular features of the institution of citizenship" (42). Although scholars hold no clear consensus on what constitutes the precise substance of denationalized citizenship, the term enjoys currency both as an expression of an "aspirational claim" to new forms...

Voluntary or Mandatory: That is (Not) the Question. Linking Corpo- rate Citizenship to Human Rights Obligations for Business

Human have traditionally been considered a domain of governments. The ongoing economic globalization, however, has rendered this state-centered view increasingly inadequate. In this contribution we will argue that also the powerful transnational corporations must bear more and more direct responsibility for the impact of their actions on human rights. Florian Wettstein and Sandra Waddock will first clarify the conceptual connection between existing approaches to corporate citizenship (CC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the newly emerging business and human rights debate. Partly in contradiction to the traditional view on CSR/CC as a voluntary affair for business, we will then plea for mandatory human standards for corporations. However, human obligations are not always clear-cut and evident; especially so-called positive often create contingent and often highly ambiguous duties for many different actors.

Corporate citizenship and social responsibility in a globalized world

This article addresses the rise of corporate citizenship in the context of the changes in the nature of individual citizenship and the emergence of new, non‐territorial forms of national identity that are occurring in the current era of intensifying globalization. It also ponders the power of corporate citizens and the role they play in the prevailing global governance framework, as well as the extent to which they can behave responsibly and pursue sustainable development goals. More generally, the article discusses the limits to corporate social responsibility and the extent to which capitalism can be ‘caring’. The argument advanced is that, by virtue of their very nature, transnational corporations (TNCs) cannot become fully responsible and accountable citizens. Nonetheless, they can be induced to transform themselves in ways that may be compatible with socially and environmentally desirable objectives. Lastly, the article explores paths for action and, in particular, the potential of NGOs and anti‐globalization social movements to become civil regulators able to push for the introduction of binding rules and regulations and the construction a governance framework capable of restraining and harnessing the power of TNCs.

Transnational Corporations and Public Accountability

AbstractThis article considers the issue of public accountability of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the light of the experiences of the past 30 years. It discusses the problem of accountability of corporations in general and examines the accountability gaps that are particularly severe as a result of the global reach and power of TNCs, notably those related to the collusion between government officials and TNCs, to regulatory competition, to state weakness and breakdown, and to political subversion. Then existing attempts to close those gaps are assessed, including intergovernmental cooperation, business ‘self-regulation’ and initiatives that involve nongovernmental organizations and supranational agencies in defining standards of conduct for companies and monitoring their compliance.

Globalization and inequity as determinants of malnutrition: A clear need for activism

Attempts to reduce food insecurity and malnutrition have generally concentrated on food availability rather than on food demand, and on technical solutions such as micronutrient fortification and supplementation rather than on improving equitable access to adequate food, health and care. Relatively little attention has been devoted to important external determinants such as globalization and actions of transnational corporations (TNCs). In the last two decades, inequity has greatly increased with a widening gap between rich and poor, while globalization has been offered as the answer to improving the economies of poor countries. Much power has been moved to the marketplace and to TNCs who are neither adequately regulated nor accountable to national governments nor their citizens. It is important that nutrition scientists study these issues, and link up with other activists working to reduce inequity, oppose harmful aspects of globalization, and reign in the power of TNCs. Activism has previously achieved some successes, notably in countering the unethical promotion of breastmilk substitutes.

Past and Present Acts of Exclusion

Past and Present Acts of Exclusion

Fair trade in tourism

Tourism as an industry is increasing rapidly in developing countries. Due to historical inequality in global trading relationships on the basis of ‘core‐periphery’ dependency, globalisation and liberalised free trade, mainstream mass tourism reinforces the social and economic disadvantages of southern destinations. The ‘Fair Trade Movement’ has sought to redress unequal trading by promoting fair trade in commodities with small producers in the South, enabling them to take control over the production and marketing process and challenging the power of transnational corporations. This paper examines the feasibility of fair trade in tourism. It explores the obstacles and opportunities that might lead to establishing a definition of fair trade in tourism, incorporating criteria that would be workable and practical for both partners in the South and North. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Putting capital in its place: globalization and the prospects for labor

The fate of workers in the face of globalization has been much decried and debated, but usually from the wrong angle. The focus of conventional discussion is almost always on labor markets and the woes of international wage competition. In critical approaches, the miracle of global capital mobility and the power of transnational corporations come in for the most attention, for their presumed role in the offshoring of industry from the advanced economies and build-up of cheap-labor platforms in the newly industrializing countries. In contrast, the argument presented here points the finger of blame away from the economic failings of workers and successes of capital to the worldwide political defeat of the working class and global economic failures of capitalism.

The ideology of transnational enterprise

In recent years, numerous individuals from the business and academic professions have constructed an ideological justification for the spread of transnational enterprise. Invoking classical Free Trade doctrine, the “Corporate Cobdenites” argue that the proliferation of transnational corporations within an interdependent world economy holds forth the promise of international peace, prosperity, and a growing freedom for all people. The historical significance of liberalism as the ideology of capitalism invites scrutiny of the modern Free Trade doctrine in light of the issue of power. Employing the theory of “postimperialism” advanced by Richard L. Sklar, I argue that the internationalization of corporate capital through direct foreign investment combined with the steady growth of transnational enterprise in recent decades heralds the rise of a transnational class based largely on corporate enterprise. This development, moreover, signals the eclipse of the era of capitalist imperialism by the new stage of corporate international capitalism in the era of postimperialism. Modern Free Trade ideology justifies the rise of transnational corporate power by defining the global marketplace as a realm of freedom apart from the coercive domain of nation-states. In the tradition of American constitutionalism and corporate-liberal reform, moreover, the Corporate Cobdenites promote the consolidation of transnational corporate power by applying the logic of the corporate reconstruction of American society to international relations and the world market.

The Political Economy and Class Analytics of International Capital Flows: US Industrial Capital in the 1970s and 1980s

The weakening of working class and popular organisations that is often attributed to the growing power of transnational corporations is an aspect of a generalised restructuring of class relations in both core and periphery. With class, rather than power or wealth, as our theoretical entry point, it appears that the state retains influence over international flows of industrial and banking capital.

Asymmetric Players and Bargaining for Profit Shares in Natural Resource Development

In this paper we study how natural resource development contracts depend on the level of bargaining power of Trans National Corporations (Agents) and host country governments (Principal). We concentrate on share contracts where a portion of the net firm income from resource development is transferred to the government, and show that (i) as the number of agents increase, the principal receives a greater share; (ii) if either player is able to threaten the other, the threatening player receives a greater share; and (iii) if the principal shares in production costs, he obtains a greater share. These results would generally be invariant if the principal was less risk averse than the agent.

Bargaining Power, Ownership, and Profitability of Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries

As the bargaining power of the transnational corporations (TNCs) in the sample increased relative to the bargaining power of the host country, and as the desire of the TNCs for a high level of equity ownership increased, the percent equity ownership of the TNCs in their subsidiaries increased. The relationship between percent equity ownership and subsidiary success from the TNCs' viewpoint, however, was J-shaped. High and low levels of equity ownership were associated with high levels of success. Control of critical operational variables by the TNC was directly related to success.

Capital and nation-state

Abstract The internationalisation of capital and the emergence of powerful transnational corporations are well documented. But how have they affected the role of the nation-state in the world economy? And what is (and has been) the relationship between the national and international development of world capitalism? These are some of the central questions raised in this article, which strongly argues for the necessity of formulating a theory of the nation-state as elaborate as that of capital. Only then will we be able to fully understand the economic, political and social consequences of the rise of transnational corporations.