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The largest, wealthiest corporations have gained unprecedented power and influence in contemporary life. From cradle to grave the decisions made by these entities have an enormous impact on how we live and work, what we eat, our physical and psychological health, what we know or believe, whom we elect, and how we deal with one another and with the natural world around us. At the same time, government seems ever more subservient to the power of these oligopolies, providing numerous forms of corporate welfare—tax breaks, subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts—while neglecting the most basic needs of the population. In Corporate Power, Oligopolies, and the Crisis of the State, Luis Suarez-Villa employs a multidisciplinary perspective to provide unprecedented documentation of a growing crisis of governance, marked by a massive transfer of risk from the private sector to the state, skyrocketing debt, great inequality and economic insecurity, along with an alignment of the interests of politicians and a new, minuscule but immensely wealthy and influential corporate elite. Thanks to this dysfunctional environment, Suarez-Villa argues, stagnation and a vanishing public trust have become the hallmarks of our time.
Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism is a major contribution to our understanding of how technology oligopolies are shaping America’s social, economic, and political reality. Technology oligopolies are the most powerful socioeconomic entities in America. From cradle to grave, the decisions they make affect the most intimate aspects of our lives, how we work, what we eat, our health, how we communicate, what we know and believe, whom we elect, and how we relate to one another and to nature. Their power over markets, trade, regulation, and most every aspect of our governance is more intrusive and farther-reaching than ever. They benefit from tax breaks, government guarantees, and bailouts that we must pay for and have no control over. Their accumulation of capital creates immense wealth for a minuscule elite, deepening disparities while politics and governance become ever more subservient to their power. They determine our skills and transform employment through the tools and services they create, as no other organizations can. They produce a vast array of goods and services with labor, marketing, and research that are more intrusively controlled than ever, as workplace rights and job security are curtailed or disappear. Our consumption of their products—and their capacity to promote wants—is deep and far reaching, while the waste they generate raises concerns about the survival of life on our planet. And their links to geopolitics and the martial domain are stronger than ever, as they influence how warfare is waged and who will be vanquished. Technology and Oligopoly Capitalism’s critical, multidisciplinary perspective provides a systemic vision of how oligopolistic power shapes these forces and phenomena. An inclusive approach spans the spectrum of technology oligopolies and the ways in which they deploy their power. Numerous, previously unpublished ideas expand the repertory of established work on the topics covered, advancing explanatory quality—to elucidate how and why technology oligopolies operate as they do, the dysfunctions that accompany their power, and their effects on society and nature. This book has no peers in the literature, in its scope, the unprecedented amount and diversity of documentation, the breadth of concepts, and the vast number of examples it provides. Its premises deserve to be taken into account by every student, researcher, policymaker, and author interested in the socioeconomic and political dimensions of technology in America.
Transnational corporations have used their market and political power in the U.S., the European Union and Japan to expand global production on terms that are highly favorable to corporate interests. Through a detailed history of the establishment of global value chains, Ronald W. Cox examines how corporations have internationalized production by working directly with political elites to establish terms of investment and trade that facilitate working class exploitation. He also examines the political implications of the growing gap between the global rich and the working class, including the increasing illegitimacy of corporate-backed governments in the United States and the European Union. The author concludes the book with suggestions for how the global working class can fight for their own interests in the context of the rising threats of far-right extremism and neo-fascist political movements.
In Big Business and the State Harland Prechel develops a conceptual framework that contrasts with prevailing definitions of the corporation. His analysis shows that corporate property rights and the legal basis of ownership are crucial to understanding corporate behavior. The book examines how historical transitions affected the three most significant corporate transformations in the last 110 years (1880s–1900s, 1920s–1930s, 1980s–1990s). During each period, in response to economic crisis, big business engaged in political behavior to pressure state managers to realign the institutional arrangements in which corporations were embedded. The historical multicausal method shows that economic crisis, managerial inefficiencies, dependence on external capital markets, and the political processes of redefining corporate property rights and corporate tax laws are crucial to understanding corporate transformation.
Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.
Uncertainty surrounds the use of publicity as a means of controlling corporate crime. On the one hand, some agree with Justice Brandeis's dictum that light is "the best of disinfectants...the most efficient policeman." On the other hand, many believe that corporations' internal affairs are effectively shrouded with a thick fog that prevents the light of public scrutiny from reaching them. The Impact of Publicity on Corporate Offenders is the first study to go beyond the rhetoric, through an examination of corporate experience. Fisse and Braithwaite have carried out a qualitative inquiry concerning 17 large corporations involved in publicity crises. Based mainly on interviews, the inquiry includes company employees and former employees, union officials, officers of government regulatory agencies, competitors, independent accountants, government prosecutors, public interest activists, judicial officers, stockbrokers, and other experts.
Addresses the issue of modern corporate power, exposing the harmful effects gobalization is having not only on economics, but also on politics, society and the environment
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.
"Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new economy--and, if we act upon it, a new system--are forming. What is that next system? It's not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else--something entirely American. In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about why the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one--and how to strengthen our communities through cooperatives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, small and medium-size independent businesses, and publicly owned enterprises. For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do? offers an evolutionary, common-sense solution for moving from despair and anger to strategy and action."--Publisher's website.
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century? Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits. Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations. Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant, and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical genre.