Power Dynamics and Corporate Power in Governance Processes: Evidence From U.S. Environmental Governance Systems

Prior research has documented involvement of government and civil society actors in governance processes, but has largely neglected a key player: corporate business interests. Combining insights from social-ecological systems, organizational systems theory, theories of governance and power, interest group rule-making participation, and non-state alternative environmental governance, we examine corporate involvement and power in environmental governance systems. Drawing on a sample of Twitter messages about fuel economy standards, posted between 2012 and 2020, we offer a sector-level discourse analysis of corporate power and its interaction with the sociopolitical environment. The results suggest that business interests are gaining increasing power in the participation arena of U.S. fuel economy governance processes. The results likewise indicate corporations’ response to a changing political landscape in the U.S. Taken together, our analysis advances current scholarship on power dynamics in governance processes and on empirical assessment of power, offering implications for governance system design and implementation.

Conclusion

This conclusion returns to the book’s central puzzle, theoretical argument, and research questions. It synthesizes key findings and shows how the answers to the research questions make continued violence and civil war less puzzling, even in a world with many international actors taking steps to prevent and resolve them. It also returns to the conditions that encourage corporations to engage in peacebuilding: local factors that can help encourage private action. It concludes by discussing the implications for conflict prevention and resolution in an era with increasingly globalized economic ties and corporate power.

Women’s Underrepresentation in Corporate Power in Norway and US: Beyond In-group Favoritism

Despite increasing gender-equality in many areas, corporate power is still strongly male-dominated. Prevailing research often relies on the cognitive, demand-side mechanism of in-group favoritism based on single-country studies to produce generalized explanations of men’s dominance in top management and to recommend remedies, such as gender quotas on boards. However, existing research findings are mixed. We contribute to the research field by analyzing original data from 457 large companies in Norway and the US, examining associations of the gender-composition on boards and in the actual Executive Committees. The predictions of in-group favoritism are partly supported in the US, but largely not supported for Norwegian companies with gender-balanced boards due to quotas. We argue that in-group favoritism is an incomplete explanation. We call for research examining the organizational and societal processes curtailing the supply of qualified women for top-executive positions, across national and regulatory contexts and organizational levels.

Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate power, and the open source ethos

The “open source” model initially emerged as a way for programmers to collaborate on efforts to build and share code, but has since evolved to embody an ethos of sharing and cooperation that pervades software development as a whole. As many technologists have seen, however, a philosophy of openness can leave them vulnerable to attempts by large corporations to use the norms of open source communities for their own benefits. This article examines the breach of social trust that occurs when companies do not fulfill expectations of reciprocity in their relationships with open source communities, and instead attempt to co-opt their work for monetary gain. Through analysis of three case studies, I seek to emphasize the often misleading nature of these processes and show that they are directly incorporated into the business models of large corporations, even if they are not openly acknowledged as such.

Zombie infrastructure: A legal geography of railroad monstrosity in the California desert

This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.’s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes.