Who’s in charge? Corporations as institutions of global governance

In 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.