Political Power and Authority of Multinational Corporations

Author(s):  
Mark Twain

Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the Kingdom, as far as political power and authority were concerned, much was made of me. My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable....


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Liss

Previous sociological studies demonstrated that U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) had durable political power to motivate U.S. trade policy. However, why did the United States switch from a “free trade” to an “America First” trade agenda? Economists and political scientists argue that protectionist voters elected the protectionist candidate—Trump. An alternative sociological explanation is that U.S. MNCs lost political power to competing stakeholder groups. The article uses qualitative and quantitative methods to test these competing theories using the case study of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The article argues that both theories are necessary, and neither are sufficient. The United States withdrew from the TPP because increasing negative effects of trade and investment in the United States reshaped trade politics, especially on the republican side; however, power relations between stakeholder groups had to shift as well. U.S. MNCs lost political influence over trade policy to new domestic manufacturing organizations and their networks with labor and fair trade coalitions.


1985 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 234-252
Author(s):  
Donald C. Clarke

One of the major changes in Chinese Government policy since the death of Mao Zedong has been the new emphasis on the need for stability and regularity in everyday life, to be achieved by the systematic codification of laws and the strengthening of institutions for administering them. Since 1978 much legislation has been enacted with this end in mind, but the significance of this legislation is not self-evident. What the new laws minimally represent is a set of rules promulgated by the government which purport to govern social relationships in specified areas. Whatever else they might mean – that is, what social effects will follow from the declaration of particular rules – needs to be understood through a study of the individuals and institutions that will have to deal with these rules. Fundamentally, this is a matter of asking whether and why violations of “the law” should matter, and who has the power to find a violation and to remedy it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Anne Dennett

This chapter discusses the historical development of the UK constitution. The key to understanding the evolution of the British constitution is to imagine it being shaped by a dynamic ebb and flow of power between the key players—the monarch, Parliament, the Church, governments, judges—to determine the issue of where supreme power and authority would ultimately settle and reside. In the case of the UK, supreme authority settled in the monarch in Parliament, while political power resided with the executive. The chapter then argues that the constitution is fluid and changing, despite the received view that it has evolved slowly and peacefully without invasion or violent revolution. Despite fluctuations in power, and changes in Britain’s territorial composition and external alliances, there has always been a sense that the constitution is based on the collective memory of ancient laws and principles that fundamentally protect the people and cannot be changed.


1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. M. Beattie

In terms of Marc Bloch's celebrated definition, the traditional interlacustrine Bantu kingdom of Bunyoro, in western Uganda, is ‘feudal’ in some respects but not in others. This is shown by a survey of Bunyoro's traditional political institutions, some of which tended to decentralize, others to centralize, political power and authority. Of the first, the most important were the considerable degree of independence enjoyed by the chiefs, and the largely self-sufficient community relationships of neighbourhood and kinship. Of the centripetal institutions, some linked the people to the kingship, others bound the chiefs to the king. Examples of both types are described. It is concluded that although traditional Bunyoro shared some features with European ‘feudal’ states, it also differed from them in important respects. Thus it would be misleading to refer to it, without a good deal of qualification, as a ‘feudality’.


2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynda Day

Abstract This paper examines the theory and praxis of women's political activism in contemporary Sierra Leone. In spite of the steady upswing in the number of women elected or appointed to positions of political authority, the growing influence of women in politics runs into male resistance which privately and derisively refers to women's newly held positions of authority and public clout as "bottom power." This essay proposes that male pushback results from a neo-liberal women's movement that frames women's economic marginality and lack of access to political power as the result of patriarchy and male privilege, rather than using an African feminist framework which recognizes women's lack of resources as primarily the result of the appropriation of the country's wealth by multinational corporations, lending agencies and members of the elite. If viewed from this perspective, the women's movement would be framed as a socially transformative struggle for all sectors of society, and not as a contest between men and women for power.


Author(s):  
USAAMA AL-AZAMI

Abstract The concept of ḥākimiyya (sovereignty), as understood by its leading proponents, refers to the notion that it is God, rather than humans, Who possesses the prerogative to make laws. A concomitant of this is that Muslims with political power and authority must recognise the supremacy of Islamic law. This notion, perhaps most notably articulated in modern times by Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, may be viewed as the rearticulation of ideas latent in the premodern Islamic juristic tradition, but whose modern incarnation as ḥākimiyya emerged in response to the legislative norms of the liberal colonial state. Despite its modern articulation, and against the views of several scholars, I argue that ḥākimiyya qua sovereignty finds its antecedents quite clearly in the Islamic scholarly tradition. Such an understanding leads into a discussion of how Islamic conceptions of sovereignty can help us reassess influential Western articulations of the concept. I also show that Mawdūdī's influential younger contemporary, the Islamist alim Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī, upholds ḥākimiyya despite his critique of Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb's conceptions of it. I conclude with a brief reflection on how our understanding of ḥākimiyya as sovereignty can help us provincialise Europe in global historical studies.


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