Structuring Power: Business and Authority Beyond the Nation-State – with Abraham Newman

What is the relationship between globalization and the political power of business? Much of the existing literature focuses on the ability of mobile capital to threaten exit in order to press for more business friendly rules. In this article, we refine arguments about exit options in global markets by arguing that the relative exit options available to business and other actors are neither fixed, nor exogenous consequences of some generically conceived process of globalization. Instead, they themselves are the result of struggles between actors with different interests and political opportunities. Since exit options play a crucial role in determining the relative structural power of business vis-à-vis other actors, we dub the power to shape exit options structuring power, distinguishing it from structural power, and argue that it is crucial to explaining it. We identify two channels through which actors can shape exit options – extending jurisdictional reach and reshaping the rules of other jurisdictions – and the factors that will make regulators and business more or less capable of exercising structuring power. We then use two exploratory case studies – one involving privacy regulation, the other accountancy standards – to illustrate how structuring power can work to shape exit options, and thus structural power. We conclude by considering the relationship between structuring power, structural power, and the existing literature in comparative and international political economy.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2015), “Structuring Power: Business and Authority Beyond the Nation-State,” Business and Politics, 17,3:527-552.

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Brexit, Voice and Loyalty: Rethinking Electoral Politics in an Age of Interdependence – with Abraham Newman

In the wake of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, known as Brexit, scholars of international affairs have a chance to reflect on what this unanticipated event means for global politics. Many scholars have started applying standard political economy models based on the distributional consequences of trade or the sociotropic sources of ...
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Essay

Big Brother’s Liberal Friends

IT IS strange that the Obama administration has so avidly continued many of the national-security policies that the George W. Bush administration endorsed. The White House has sidelined the key recommendations of its own advisers about how to curtail the overreach of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has failed to prosecute those responsible for ...
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