Michael C. Dreiling

Corporate Unity in American Trade Policy: A Network Analysis of Corporate-Dyad Political Action

This essay examines factors that produce political unity among large U.S. corporations advocating free trade. Expanding on old debates, these data and analyses validate the importance of organizational and class cohesion approaches to corporate political action. Methodologically, the political unity of pairs (dyads) of firms in trade policy activism is analyzed with quadratic assignment procedure regression. Shared membership in prominent policy networks and board interlocks positively predict corporate political unity across three areas of trade policy influence, from the executive branch to the legislature. Non-network organizational indicators also significantly predicted corporate trade policy activism. The findings support business unity accounts of corporate political action and suggest that higher levels of firm embeddedness within intercorporate networks facilitate collective corporate political action.

The Class Embeddedness of Corporate Political Action: Leadership in Defense of the NAFTA

This paper examines the sources and significance of inter-corporate unity in political defense of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Using a wide range of firm-level and inter-corporate network data, the author analyzes sources of leadership in the USA*NAFTA coalition among a sample of 200 corporations. Business Roundtable affiliation and higher degrees of centrality within U.S. Trade Advisory Committees significantly increased the odds of a corporation assuming leadership in the USA*NAFTA coalition. Board of director network centrality also influenced leadership outcomes. The number of subsidiary operations in Mexico, ranked sales, labor intensity of firm operations, and ideological propensities of political action committee contributions had significant bivariate associations, though did not significantly improve the fit of the logistic model. The very strong effects of Business Roundtable membership and centrality in the Trade Advisory network confirm the importance of inter-corporate cohesion in the policy formation process and the propitious functions of inter-firm networks in mobilizing a collective defense of the policy outcome; that is, the NAFTA. Consistent with a class embeddedness account, the analysis provides support for political theories of trade policy and globalization that are attentive to the relationship between class organization and state structure.

Environmental movement organizations and political strategy : Tactical conflicts over NAFTA

The authors introduce the study of material-organizational dependencies into research on political differences in the environmental movement. Presently, the study of disparities in the environmental movement focuses on the ideological differences among major environmental groups to the exclusion of some very glaring discrepancies in the material-organizational context of these groups. The authors present a conceptual model of organizational differences among several U.S. environmental movement organizations to explain variation in their political behavior in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fight (1991-1993). The case of NAFTA offers a useful context given the volatility of environmental movement politics at the time, the range of issues forced to the surface in major groups, and the ultimate movement split that the politics over NAFTA engendered. It is evident that the split between pro-NAFTA and anti-NAFTA environmental groups stems in large part from substantial differences in both the ideological frames and material-organizational alliances formed among these groups.

From developmentalism to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Contrasting the socio-political contexts of large-scale development and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Lesotho, our analysis captures important historical conjunctures that expanded opportunities for the mobilization of womens rights as human rights. Local womens rights organizations, such as Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), found greater support and resonance for womens rights claims amid the socio-political context of the AIDS crisis, in marked contrast to the stifling of those same claims during a period of neoliberal, nationalist development initiatives in Lesotho. The AIDS crisis in particular introduced new international actors that helped support a ‘frame bridging’ strategy whereby womens rights were characterized as health rights, rooted in a critique of the AIDS crisis that identified the role of gender inequality as an important driver of the epidemic. These links to transnational feminist networks as well as to international health agencies bolstered the critiques of gender inequality articulated by WLSA and other womens rights advocates, helping usher in a series of legal changes in Lesotho in 2003 and 2006.

NAFTA and Transnational Contention: A Decade of Alliance and Conflict over Neoliberalism

As the previous chapters in this book make clear, North American contention over trade and globalization is now part of the world historical stage. Tensions between regionalization and globalization arose from the early struggles against the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) and onward to present-day concerns about the evolution of the so-called ‘Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America’ (SPP). In this chapter, we focus on the profusion of conflict at a continental level, though not without acknowledging an implicit understanding that much of what propels regionalization is a response to globalization. Forces of contraction and expansion affect the ambitions of social movements as well as states and corporations. In this chapter, we suggest that contention over international trade in North America has indeed taken a transnational form and has done so within a dynamic ‘alliance and conflict system’ (ACS).

Networking for women’s rights: academic centers, regional information networks, and feminist advocacy in southern Africa

ABSTRACT Women’s rights advocates, in southern Africa as elsewhere, have challenged gender inequality to advance the status of women in society and as a means to also address related, cumulative issues of disadvantage. As communication technologies and neoliberal globalization alter forms of communication, the potential for organizing, coalitions, and advocacy work across time and space, such as through transnational feminist networks (TFNs), has grown. Understanding the rise of TFNs has largely relied on historical narratives and case studies, and the literature has tended to emphasize transnational over regional dimensions. Our approach, however, finds that regional connections not only play an important role in linking TFNs to local women’s rights initiatives in southern Africa, but that information-rich academic institutes focusing on gender studies bring structure to local and regional information networks in the region and act as bridges between the local, regional and global. Methodologically, we employ an innovative approach to visibly capture the work of regional and local activists by taking a meso-level snapshot of website links among 70 women’s rights organizations operating in southern Africa. We pair the network visualization with a case study of our central academic center, the African Gender Institute, to demonstrate the work of this critical hub in the local and regional communication network.

The Social Construction of Free Trade: The European Union, Nafta, and MercosurThe Social Construction of Free Trade: The European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, by DuinaFrancesco. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 249 pp.

ration of families in the U.S., and whether new communities and social movements are emerging from experiences of transnational adoption. Dorow occasionally compares domestic and transnational adoption practices and her goal in this book is not to offer us explicit comparisons. Nevertheless, in considering issues of race and racialization, it would be illuminating to know more about the cultural economy of domestic adoption, particularly in cases of transracial domestic adoption, and how they might differ from or be similar to transnational adoption. This fine piece of work will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists working in the areas of kinship, marriage and the family, political economy, and transnational migration.