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Decarbonization, hegemonic projects, and the green growth policy-planning network: the case of Québec
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When talking about oil and gas production in Canada, most of the attention focuses on Western provinces, especially Alberta and British Columbia. Yet, the whole country is deeply locked into carbon extractivism. This report looks at the state of carbon lock-in in Eastern Canada, a region often neglected regarding energy conversations.
Carbon lock-in refers to the technological and institutional blockages to energy transition that can be traced back to economic and political choices made in the past. Despite the urgent need for energy transition, Eastern provinces – the four Atlantic provinces plus Québec – are still highly dependent on existing fossil infrastructure for electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industrial activity. Some provinces also depend on this infrastructure for employment and governmental revenue. Since 2010, 19 additional carbon extractive projects have been proposed across all five eastern provinces. These projects, some still being discussed, would have further entrenched the region in carbon lock-in were it not for the strong resistance from Indigenous and settler civil society groups.
Carbon lock-in crucially stems from the material infrastructure of the oil and gas commodity chain – from extraction sites, through pipeline, rail or ship transportation, to refining sites, and to end consumption sites where oil and gas are burned, releasing energy and greenhouse gases. Large corporations control all stages of this chain, some of the most profitable in Canada, to benefit their national and international shareholders. This report maps out this infrastructure to emphasize the material aspects of fossil dependency and the struggles to break away from it.
In the face of climate catastrophe and local environmental destruction, grassroots activists and environmental NGOs have been mobilizing across Eastern Canada to oppose further entrenchment of fossil dependency. Most of these struggles have been successful: most of the proposed fossil expansion has been blocked, moratoriums on shale gas exploration were put in place in all provinces, PEI legislated a ban on hydraulic fracturing in 2017, and Québec put an end to all oil and gas extraction in its territory in 2022. All provinces have also put forth climate action plans with quantified emissions reduction targets that are updated regularly. These targets are often designed to be easy to reach or are simply not respected. Still, activists in all provinces are pressuring governments to keep to their commitments to various degrees. In Québec, out of the strong movement that emerged from the struggles against fracking and the Energy East pipeline came a broad-ranging just transition plan based on social justice principles and is now pushing to wind down fossil gas dependency.
But there is pushback: New Brunswick partially lifted its fracking moratorium and is dragging its feet to implement transition; Newfoundland and Labrador strongly supports expanding offshore oil extraction and, up to now, has been given the green light from the federal government to do so. Additionally, while new infrastructure projects have been successfully challenged, there needs to be more campaigns directed at existing fossil infrastructure, which nonetheless needs to be dismantled to achieve decarbonization. Other challenges include coordinating movement responses to new energy sources, especially to hydrogen, which is being touted as a technological solution for decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors, but which has significant environmental and carbon impacts.
Where do things stand today for organizing against further carbon lock-in and just transition? This report assesses the state-of-play of carbon lock-in in early 2023 and contributes to the discussion about achieving decarbonization and just transition in Eastern Canada.
Also available here: https://policyalternatives.ca/fossilfuellockin
Capital is pushing into motion ever larger global material flows. In doing so it has come to depend on massive expenditures of energy, putting to work fossil fuels and the machines they animate to transform the world, accumulate power and grow the economy. The ecological relations and crises of today’s societies are driven by the processes of extraction of the elements that come together as a throughput of material and energy flows controlled by capital and shaped by its imperative of valorization.
In A Social Ecology of Capital, Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century.
Drawing on ecological economics and critical political economy, the book analyses how the social structures of accumulation, production, consumption and waste determine and regulate the material flow and the accumulation of material artifacts. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, the book highlights the contradictions humanity now faces.
As old as industrialism or civilization itself, socio-ecological problems are nothing new. Despite all efforts to resolve environmental dilemmas, socio-ecological catastrophe has only intensified. Governments, in response, have unveiled the green economy to confront ecological and climate catastrophe. The green economy, however, has worsened socio-ecological conditions, invigorating the present trajectory of (techno)capitalist development. This article argues that the green economy serves as a tool of global counterinsurgency, managing, preempting and redirecting the inevitable ecological anxiety that could mobilize for radical social change. While fragmenting ecological opposition, the green economy meanwhile serves as a “force multiplier” for market expansion and capitalist development, as opposed to actually working towards real socio-ecological mitigation and remediation. The article proceeds by defining counterinsurgency, and indicating its relevance to the green economy. Dissecting the technics of the green economy, the next section reviews its origins and epistemological foundations by investigating the concepts and operationalization of ‘energy’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘carbon’. Then, briefly, the article reviews the extractive reality of low-carbon infrastructures, revealing the socio-ecological harm implied and justified by the green economic and decarbonization schemes. The green economy, it concludes, is a governmental technology, preventing collective self-reflection and action to (adequately) rehabilitate ecosystems and address the structural socio-ecological problems threatening the planet, thus preforming a counter-insurrectionary function in the service of state and capital.
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action.
Composed of twenty-eight essays—a combination of new and republished texts—the anthology is organised around seven main themes: paradigms; what counts?; extraction; dispatches from a climate change frontline country; governance; finance; and action(s). Through this multifaceted approach, the contributors ask pressing questions about how we conceptualise and respond to the climate crisis, providing both ‘big picture’ perspectives and more focussed case studies.
This unique and extensive collection will be of great value to environmental and social scientists alike, as well as to the general reader interested in understanding current views on the climate crisis.
The sustainable development discourse, including the modern green growth version, may have aspects that contribute to environmental and social welfare but it is a top down reform project, that aims at correcting the environmental and social externalities resulting from economic growth. It is directed by governments that abide by the logic of capital. Although in principle there is civic engagement, public participation is limited and without challenging the dominant economic paradigm. Following Gramsci's terminology, sustainable development can be interpreted as a passive revolution, in the sense that change is managed through compromises with different social and political actors but within limits which neutralize any potential threat to economic and political power. On the contrary, the emerging (yet still marginal) alternative, multi-disciplinary, degrowth academic paradigm, has evolved from an activist movement since the first decade of this century, and retains close contacts and open communication with social movements that support a degrowth transition in economy and society. This transition directly challenges the established orthodox growth narrative and the mechanisms of capital accumulation. Thus, in contrast to the sustainable development discourse, it is difficult for the "power bloc" to accommodate degrowth. But in times of crisis and change, the dominant powers can certainly use some aspects of the degrowth discourse, assimilating and transforming them into elements that fit their new accumulation strategies, hegemonic visions and state projects. For this not to happen, degrowthers should focus their research and theory more on the workings of capitalist political economy, and their political practice on trying to form alliances with social actors, such as working-class movements,that are crucial for the achievement of hegemony.
Corporate elite studies have for long investigated networks of interlocking directorates to test and corroborate key theoretical expectations regarding the cohesive organization of such an elite and their ability and willingness to act on behalf of general business interests. These studies typically collect data on a list of 50, 100, 200 or 500 corporations ranked by economic size, sometimes stratified in sectors. The sampling approach often follows previous studies in order to increase comparability. These relatively arbitrary sampling practices are problematic because they impact the empirical results and our therefore the conclusions drawn from it. Using a sample of 3251 Canada‐based corporations, we establish that indeed different sampling criteria – that is sample size, proportion of financial firms, inclusion of state‐owned enterprises and so on – significantly impacts network properties of corporate elite networks. We establish rather disturbing differences, especially for smaller sample sizes (<100). Subsequently, we develop alternative demarcation criteria of the corporate elite based on a k‐core decomposition. We conclude by emphasizing that the sampling decisions in interlocking directorate studies should much more be carefully be thought through in future research on the topic, both in corporate elite studies and beyond.
This study investigates the relationship between the carbon extractive sector in Canada and renewable energy development. Specifically, it examines the strategies employed by Canadian carbon-capital firms to shape and control alternative energy and considers if we are witnessing signs of "transition capture" as some oil, gas, and coal firms invest in a gradual shift toward "climate capitalism." I investigate first, investments by large Canada-based fossil fuel companies in renewable energy and second, interlocking directorate relations between the fossil fuel sector and the renewables industry. Findings suggest the possibility of a long-term strategic orientation toward a climate capitalist model of development by some carbon-capital firms; however, this alignment remains highly tentative, with evidence pointing to an industry that is largely without plans for energy transition.
© 2019 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
The 2007-2008 economic crisis has been used by the Quebec government to establish a series of public policies which further propel the neoliberal commodification of common goods. Rather than embodying a structural adjustment of the Quebec economy aiming at avoiding the impact of a new economic crisis, two of these policies, the “révolution tarifaire” and the “Plan Nord”, are better understood as part of a new phase of capitalist development. These two policies set the basis for the development and intensification of extensive capitalist logics. In this research note, we will circumscribe the key elements of these policies whilst emphasising their non-necessary character. We will argue that, for these two case study, the crisis was merely a pretext in order to establish and legitimize these new policies, rather than their original trigger.
Canada is ruled by an organized minority of the 1%, a class of corporate owners, managers and bankers who amass wealth by controlling the large corporations at the core of the economy. But corporate power also reaches into civil society and politics in many ways that greatly constrain democracy.
In Organizing the 1%, William K. Carroll and J.P. Sapinski provide a unique, evidence-based perspective on corporate power in Canada and illustrate the various ways it directs and shapes economic, political and cultural life.
A highly accessible introduction to Marxist political economy, Carroll and Sapinski delve into the capitalist economic system at the root of corporate wealth and power and analyze the ways the capitalist class dominates over contemporary Canadian society. The authors illustrate how corporate power perpetuates inequality and injustice. They follow the development of corporate power through Canadian history, from its roots in settler-colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, to the concentration of capital into giant corporations in the late nineteenth century. More recently, capitalist globalization and the consolidation of a market-driven neoliberal regime have dramatically enhanced corporate power while exacerbating social and economic inequalities. The result is our current oligarchic order, where power is concentrated in a few corporations that are controlled by the super-wealthy and organized into a cohesive corporate elite.
Finally, Carroll and Sapinski offer possibilities for placing corporate power where it actually belongs: in the dustbin of history.
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/organizing-the-1
In this article, we study the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of ‘Mertonian’ multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and small groups of researchers in different universities, who were independent of each other and looking for the right concepts and computer programs to implement graph theory in social analysis, first applied it to corporate interlock networks. We show how mathematical graph theory provided a toolbox for systematic network analysis and that simultaneously in the Netherlands and the United States this toolbox found an application in the study of corporate power. A historical narrative covers the three main centres in which large-scale corporate network analysis emerged – Amsterdam, California and Stony Brook. For each centre, we provide a sketch of the people involved, the tools they used, and the motivations that brought them to this topic. Our analysis makes clear that one cannot understand the emergence of computer aided network analysis without considering the personal and often political motivations of those who engaged in the first board interlock studies. Insurgent students of political science and sociology pushed for a research agenda on corporate power and found support from scholars who were keen to develop innovative network analysis methods. Hence, corporate network analysis became a legitimate field of research.
This article maps the organization of corporate power in a carbon-capital elite, centred in Calgary, whose reach extends nationally and transnationally. It charts the elite's accumulation base, its internal structure as a network of interlocking directorates and its ties to the financial sector and other segments of corporate capital - national and transnational. The analysis identifies a tightly-knit, local network of mid-sized carbon-capital firms, linked into the broader power structure largely through mediating relations involving the largest carbon-capital corporations. The architecture of corporate power resembles an entrenched oligarchy; however, both policy sociology and public sociology can contribute toward checking its power through effective regulation while facilitating discussion of energy democracy as a transformative alternative.
Alongside the climate change denial movement, a section of the capitalist class has been organizing to promote a project of “climate capitalism” that relies on carbon markets and other policies compatible with the neoliberal order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Like the denial movement, promoters of climate capitalism have constructed an extensive network of think tanks and policy-planning groups to foster adherence to their climate policy proposals. This article uses social network analysis to map out the reach of these climate and environmental policy groups within the array of interconnected NGOs, inter-governmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, and other organizations that constitute the global polity. This analysis sheds light on the position climate capitalism—understood as a project of a section of the global corporate elite—occupies among international organizations. Overall, I find that climate and environmental policy groups: (1) maintain substantial ties to key organizations of the global polity, and (2) mediate a substantial amount of relations, bridging between central organizations and more peripheral ones, as well as among those located in Europe and North America. I thus argue that a global inter-organizational infrastructure exists that supports climate capitalism, which contributes to its dominant position in climate change politics.
Why has the United States not adopted global warming policies? Because the inner circle of the corporate elite has opposed these policies despite some corporate support for cap-and-trade and other policies. Pro- and anti-positions taken by think tanks that have led the policy debate in the post-Kyoto period are analyzed in order to demonstrate this. The corporate and upper class social ties of the directors of these pro- and anti-think tanks are examined, revealing a corporate elite split between the inner circle opposing these policies, and a ‘public interest sector’ of corporate law and media corporations along with top executives from higher education and other nonprofits that is supportive of policies addressing global warming. To enable adoption of major global warming policies, the corporate inner circle will need to become supportive and forge a class-wide corporate consensus on the need to address global warming.
This paper explores the political involvement of transnational corporations and their directors in elaborating the project of 'climate capitalism' advanced to address climate change. Climate capitalism seeks to redirect investments from fossil energy to renewable energy generation, so as to foster an ecological modernization of production and reduce GHG emissions. I use social network analysis to assess the potential for climate capitalism, as a project of a section of the corporate elite, to replace the current 'carboniferous capitalist' regime. Corporate-funded climate and environmental policy groups (CEPGs) constitute major venues for the corporate elite to assemble and plan their response to the climate crisis. By mapping out the network of board-level interlocks between CEPGs and the largest transnational corporations, I first find that certain CEPGs are centrally located among the global intercorporate network, and thus well positioned to promote climate capitalism among the corporate elite. Second, I delineate a climate capitalist inner circle that includes the individual members of the corporate community who arguably are able to exert the greatest power to shape climate capitalism. However, many of them, close to the oil and nuclear sectors, may support a long-term transition away from fossil fuels, incompatible with avoiding dangerous climatic warming.
This paper analyses the corporate hegemonic structures of power underlying the project of climate capitalism. Its promoters present climate capitalism as an emerging regime of accumulation founded on carbon markets and the ecological modernization of production, that could replace the prevalent carboniferous capitalist regime and provide a deeply needed reduction of carbon emissions. We empirically map out the network of corporate-funded climate and environmental policy groups participating in climate capitalist knowledge production and mobilization to critically appraise the possibility of such a transition. We find that these policy groups are positioned to play a crucial role as intermediaries between regional and sectoral corporate interests, and that they crucially link between energy and financial firms. However, energy-finance linkages are sparse, and we also find a relatively thin network carried by a small number of individual capitalists from the fossil fuel and nuclear sectors. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that a strong climate capitalist coalition is emerging.
Since the 1970s, transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) have emerged as a component of global civil society, generating visions and strategies for a “globalization from below” that point toward post-capitalist alternatives. Here, we map the global network of TAPGs and kindred international groups in order to discern how TAPGs are embedded in a larger formation. In this era of capitalist globalization, do TAPGs, like their hegemonic counterparts, bridge across geographic spaces (e.g. North-South) and movement domains to foster the convergence across difference that is taken as a criterial attribute of a counter-hegemonic historical bloc? Our network analysis suggests that TAPGs are well placed to participate in the transformation of the democratic globalization network from a gelatinous and unselfconscious state, into an historical bloc capable of collective action toward an alternative global order. However, there are gaps in
the bloc, having to do with the representation and integration of regions and movement domains, and with the salience of post-capitalism as a unifying social vision. Also, our architectonic network analysis does not reveal what the various relations and mediations in which TAPGs are active agents actually mean in concrete practice. There is a need both for closer analysis of the specific kinds of relations that link transnational alternative policy groups to other international actors, including intergovernmental organizations and funding foundations, and for field work that explores the actual practices of these groups, in situ.
1. Theoretical Perspective: Social Forces and the Struggle Over European Order 2. Global Restructuring, Transnational Capitalism and Rival Projects for European Order 3. The European Roundtable: an Elite Forum of Europe's Emergent Transnational Capitalist Class 4. The Roundtable's Changing Strategic Project and the Transnational Struggle over European Order 5. Transnational Class Agency, the Rise of 'Embedded Neo-Liberalism' and the Evolving European Order References
This article presents a network analysis of elite interlocks among the world’s 500 largest corporations and a purposive sample of transnational policy-planning boards. The analysis compares the situation in 1996 with 2006 and reveals a process of transnational capitalist class formation that is regionally uneven. Network analysis points to a process of structural consolidation through which policy boards have become more integrative nodes, brokering elite relations between firms from different regions, especially Europe and North America. As national corporate networks have thinned, the global corporate-policy network’s centre of gravity has shifted towards Europe, both at the level of individuals and organizations. Although this study finds a modest increase in participation of corporate elites from the Global South, a North Atlantic ruling class remains at the centre of the process of transnational capitalist class formation.
Social network researchers have long sought measures of network cohesion, Density has often been used for this purpose, despite its generally admitted deficiencies. An approach to network cohesion is proposed that is based on minimum degree and which produces a sequence of subgraphs of gradually increasing cohesion. The approach also associates with any network measures of local density which promise to be useful both in characterizing network structures and in comparing networks.
A Family of new measures of point and graph centrality based on early intuitions of Bavelas (1948) is introduced. These measures define centrality in terms of the degree to which a point falls on the shortest path between others and therefore has a potential for control of communication. They may be used to index centrality in any large or small network of symmetrical relations, whether connected or unconnected.
https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/
The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
Large multinational corporations shape our lives to an enormous extent. How is the growth, power, and significance of big business to be explained and understood? Focusing on the issues of ownership, control, and class formation, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes explores the implications of changes in the nature of big business, which affect both the businesses themselves, and the economic and political milieu in which these multinationals operate. Up-to-date empirical evidence is reviewed in a wide-ranging comparative framework that covers Britain and the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and many other societies, including emerging forms of capitalism in China and Russia. Unlike other specialist texts in the area, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes relates its concerns to issues of social stratification and class structure. The first and second editions of the book (under the title Corportations, Classes and Capitalism) were enthusiastically received, and the present edition reviews new theoretical ideas and empirical evidence that has emerged in the ten years since the second edition appeared. The text has been completely re-written and re-structured, and it relates its concerns to contemporary debates over `disorganized capitalism' and post-industrialism.
This paper examines how the latest iron ore mining cycle evolved and impacted Quebec’s mining industry and communities. Our research aims to explain how globally integrated mining corporations take advantage of and generate disruptive boom and bust dynamics, leading to specific forms of restructuring at the local level. Our main argument is that overcapacity and overproduction can enhance capital accumulation rather than undermine it, given the monopolistic nature of the contemporary mining sector.
This edited collection is the culmination of years of research within the Corporate Mapping Project. It strives to provide a comprehensive account of the ways in which economic, political and cultural power of fossil capital and related capitalist fractions obstructs the radical changes that are obviously required if humanity is to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Several chapters take up the issue of transformative alternatives to business-as-usual and the new climate denialism. The book is available for purchase or free download of the formatted pdf, at https://www.aupress.ca/books/120293-regime-of-obstruction/ .
Forces of Production, Climate Change and Canadian Fossil Capitalism reinterprets the concept of forces of production from an ecological standpoint and in the context of the deepening climate crisis.
The reinterpretation leads us to consider how under capitalism, forces of production substantially take the commodity form and are embroiled within its (ecological) contradictions. This understanding challenges certain inherited Marxist views surrounding the progressivity attributable to advancements in productive forces. Recognition of the forms of environmental destructiveness (and social domination) that are woven into productive forces complicates the notion that such forces can be “unleashed” from capitalist shackles and directly provide the foundations of a sustainable future.
Simultaneously, a broad and ecological conceptualization, drawn from Marx, allows us to consider aspects of productive forces that are critical to sustainability and “rift-healing” in the 21st century. I argue that ecological knowledge itself, as well as associated developments in renewable energy technology and green infrastructure, represent advancements in productive forces. However, such “green productive forces” are fettered by capitalist relations of production, including the power of carbon capital.
In addition to a conceptual and theoretical reinterpretation, case studies focusing on Canadian fossil capitalism provide a concrete-complex analysis of the deepening of fossil-fuelled productive forces and the process of fettering in both renewable energies and in the development and application of ecological knowledge
A Green New Deal could put severe pressure on lands held by Indigenous and marginalized communities and reshape their ecologies into “green sacrifice zones.” Such cost shifting risks reproducing a form of climate colonialism in the name of just transition. Avoiding cost shifts opens interdisciplinary research questions regarding land-use policy, economics, politics, and non-Eurocentric knowledge and leadership.
This book shows how we can solve the climate change crisis, which is the greatest threat humanity has faced. Charles Derber, a prominent sociologist and political economist, shows that global warming is a symptom of deep pathologies in global capitalism. In conversational and passionate writing, Derber shows that climate change is capitalism's time bomb, certain to explode unless we rapidly transform our economy and create a new green American Dream Derber shows there is hope in the financial meltdown and Great Recession we are now suffering. The economic crisis has raised deep questions about Wall Street and the US capitalist model. Derber systematically explores the causal links between capitalism and climate change, a taboo subject in the U.S, and opens up new thinking to solve both the economic and climate crises.
Canada’s political economy has been reshaped by extractivist forces based in the western tar sands. The objective of this article is to propose a model of these socioeconomic forces identifying the structures and dynamics that characterize the hydrocarbon extractive sector in an “age of extreme oil” through the development of a theory of the capitalist pressure to extract “unburnable carbon.” This aspect of our model has wider significance for an ecological and political economics given the emerging policy consensus around the need to transition from carbon-based economies because the capitalist pressure to extract acts as a powerful counterforce to this ecological imperative.
Long-term structural changes to the American economy, such as the decline of labor unions, the era of deregulation, and the decline of commercial banking and concomitant rise of investment banking, have led to scholarly debate over the extent to which the American business class is politically unified. At the same time, the increasing globalization of economic activity over the last half century has generated similar academic disagreement regarding a potential transnational business class and its implications for national capitalist unity. In this article, I present evidence supporting the view that as of 2006, the corporate elite were relatively unified both within the United States and transnationally. Furthermore, I find that the network mechanisms that facilitate this unity are largely transnational, indicating a shift in center of corporate class organization and the interests likely represented by corporate political action in the 21st century.
How do civil society organizations mobilize on climate change? Why do they choose certain strategies over others? What are the consequences of these choices? Networks in Contention examines how the interactions between different organizations within the international climate change movement shape strategic decisions and the kinds of outcomes organizations are able to achieve. First, it documents how and why cleavages emerged in this once-unified movement around the time of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. Second, it shows how an organization’ position in the movement’s network has a large influence on the tactics it adopts. Finally, it demonstrates how the development of new strategies within this network has influenced the trajectory of global climate politics. The book establishes the ways in which networks are consequential for civil society groups, exploring how these actors can become more effective and suggesting lessons for the future coordination of activism.
Concepts and measures for basic network analysis The social network perspective emphasizes multiple levels of analysis: differences among actors are traced to the constraints and opportunities that arise from how they are embedded in networks; the structure and behavior of networks are grounded in and enacted by local interactions among actors. In this chapter we will examine basic concepts and measures used in formal social network analysis. Despite the simplicity of the ideas, there are good theoretical reasons (and considerable empirical evidence) to believe that these basic properties of social networks have very important consequences for both individuals and the larger social structures of which they are parts. There are many ways that one could organize this survey, and we will only be able to provide an introduction. For more extended treatments, the reader may wish to consult John Scott's Social Network Analysis (2000), Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust's Social ...
The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations.
The transnational capitalist class is using the global ecological crisis to revive its failing financial system. Whereas environmental degradation was once seen as imposing a limit on economic accumulation, in the new green economy', ecologism appears to become a rationale for extending market activity. The intensification of neoliberal extraction, and corresponding social and environmental debt, meets resistance from the global justice movement whose articulation of a counter position is increasingly sophisticated. This article examines this dialectic as played out at the UN Rio+20 Summit and parallel People's Summit in June 2012. The hegemonic green economy' formulation of corporations, multilateral agencies, unions, and big NGOs is contained in a document known as The Future We Want. A counter-hegemonic document entitled Another Future is Possible, facilitated by the World Social Forum, spells out an alternative route to global justice and environmental sustainabilitya bio-civilisation'. In neo-Gramscian terms, a war of position is occurring between two transnational historic blocs around divergent social visions (Carroll, 2007, p. 36).
This study uses data on campaign contributions and methods of network analysis to investigate the significance of interlocking di- rectorates for political cohesion among corporate elites. Using qua- dratic assignment procedure (QAP) regression, the author shows that social ties formed through common membership on corporate boards contribute more to similarity of political behavior than common- alities of economic interests, such as those associated with operating in the same industry or the same geographic region. Moreover, the politically cohesive effects of directorship ties remain robust even as one moves several links down the chain of indirect ties that connect top corporate officers to one another. The study thus pro- vides empirical support for the thesis that social networks among corporate elites facilitate political cohesion within the business community.
This chapter examines interlocks among the governing boards of 12 leading policy-planning organizations and changes in the structure of this network between 1973 and 2000. Methods of multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering are used to construct topographical maps of the pattern of interlocks among policy-planning groups and their change over time. In contrast to the findings on corporate interlocking directorates, the study shows that board interlocks among policy-planning organizations are substantively meaningful and relatively stable at the dyadic level, although several changes in the topology of the network are also found. In all three decades, big-business “moderate-conservatives” like the Business Council and the Business Roundtable occupied the most central locations in the network. In the 1970s these organizations were linked with the “corporate liberals” to form the core cluster of the policy network. In the 1980s and 1990s the corporate liberals became relatively isolated from the core and their places were taken by several conservative groups. There was also a sharp rise in the cohesion of the network in the late 1970s and 1980s – a period that is widely seen as one of conservative political mobilization and heightened political unity among business elites. These changes in the structure of the policy network are consistent with and help to account for the rightward shift in U.S. state policy during this period.
Until recently, Manoilesco's confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an événementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.
Political science is fascinated with networks. This fascination builds on networks' descriptive appeal, and descriptions of networks play a prominent role in recent forays into network analysis. For some time, quantitative research has included node-level measures of network characteristics in standard regression models, thereby incorporating network concepts into familiar models. This approach represents an early advance for the literature but may (a) ignore fundamental theoretical contributions that can be found in a more structurally oriented network perspective, (b) focus attention on superficial aspects of networks as they feed into empirical work, and (c) present the network perspective as a slight tweak to standard models that assume complete independence of all relevant actors. We argue that network analysis is more than a tweak to the status quo ante; rather, it offers a means of addressing one of the holy grails of the social sciences: effectively analyzing the interdependence and flows of influence among individuals, groups, and institutions.
396 p., graph., ref. bib. : 28 p.1/2 In this groundbreaking paradigm for the economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution, one that promises to transform our fundamental notions about commerce and its role in shaping our future. Over the past decade many farsighted companies have begun to discover remarkable opportunities for saving both money and resources through the ingenious application of novel technologies and business practices. Consider the following. The automobile industry is undergoing a transformation that will spell the end of the petroleum industry and a shift away from traditional car models to Hypercars"―fuel cell-powered vehicles that would be both lighter and safer, produce negligible pollution, cost both the producer and consumer less, and have fuel efficiencies as high as 200 miles per gallon. : New houses designed with heat-trapping "super-windows" can remain cool in temperatures as high as 115° F with no air conditioner and warm at - 47° F with no furnace, and cost less to build. Atlanta-based Interface Corporation is shifting from selling carpeting to leasing floor-covering services, using a new material that's more attractive, requires 97 percent less material, is cheaper to produce, and is completely recyclable. Today's best techniques for using wood fiber more productively could supply all the paper and wood the world currently requires from an area about the size of Iowa. In the long-anticipated new book by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins, these durable, practical, and stunningly profitable principles are synthesized for the first time into the foundations for a system called natural capitalism. With hundreds of thousands of copies of their works in print worldwide, the authors are leaders in set-ting the agenda for rational, ecologically sound industrial development, and in Natural Capitalism they have written their most significant and genuinely inspiring work. Traditional capitalism, they argue, has always neglected to assign monetary value to its largest stock of capital―namely, the natural resources and ecosystem services that make possible all economic activity, and all life. Natural capitalism, in contrast, takes a proper accounting of these costs. As the first step toward a solution to environmental loss, it advocates resource productivity-doing more with less, wringing up to a hundred times as much benefit from each unit of energy or material consumed. Natural capitalism also redesigns industry on biological models that result in zero waste, shifts the economy from the episodic acquisition of goods to the continual flow of value and service, and prudently invests in sustaining and expanding existing stores of natural capital. Drawing upon sound economic logic, intelligent technologies, and the best of contemporary design, Natural, Capitalism presents a business strategy that is both profitable and necessary. The companies that practice it will not only take a leading position in addressing some of our most profound economic and social problems, but will gain a decisive competitive advantage through the worthy employment of resources, money, and people.