Corporations

Corporations are among the most powerful institutions on the planet. We are often told that as their operations increase in size and scope, the world is increasingly 'ruled' by them. This perspective has been at the heart of debates about globalisation in IPE that revolve around the prospect of the demise of the nation state due to the 'inevitability' of global neoliberal market deregulation. This prospect is celebrated by liberalists for the triumph of free market capitalism that it heralds, while it is attacked by marxist anti-globalisers as evidence of the spread of exploitative relations of production and of the deeper embedding of a core-versus-periphery structure in the global political economy. Between these views there is a more nuanced debate that revolves around the extent to which states are being constrained to function (rather than rule) in a more passive, market-facilitating role, with the interests they serve being corporate ones rather than those of their citizens. The argument about the extent to which global markets and corporations, as the key actors in them, are now 'in charge' is therefore a central and ongoing one in contemporary IPE…