William K. Carroll

Democratic media activism through the lens of social movement theory

This article considers how we are to understand democratic media activism, which has recently burgeoned in Canada, the UK and the USA. What is its political significance and potential? Is it a new social movement, a new style of politics cutting across movements, or are new concepts needed? Drawing illustratively upon interviews with media activists, notably in Vancouver, we explore insights offered by social movement theory - including resource mobilization formulations and the new social movement theories of Melucci, Habermas, Cohen and Arato, and Fraser. While all these traditions offer valuable insights, media activism reveals limitations in existing conceptualizations. It has some of the characteristics of a movement, but lacks a distinct collective identity or niche within movement ecology. It may be destined to be a boundary-transgressing nodal point for other movements, articulating a coherent project for radical democracy, rather than a movement-for-itself.

Is there a transnational business community

This article tries to answer two questions. The first is whether capitalist class formation is now taking place at a transnational level; the second is what regime of corporate governance was becoming dominant in the last quarter of the 20th century. The answers given are based on a comparison of the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy as of 1976 and 1996. The analysis suggests that from the 1970s to the 1990s an Atlantic business system developed. However, Japanese firms were not integrated into this network while the European Union was indeed creating a European business community. The research lends support to the hypothesis that the network has become less a device for domination and control and more a device for building hegemony. This also suggests that corporate governance is increasingly based on exit strategies rather than on voice as has been common in continental European contexts.

The network of global corporations and elite policy groups: a structure for transnational capitalist class formation?

This study situates five top transnational policy–planning groups within the larger structure of corporate power that is constituted through interlocking directorates among the worlds largest companies. Each group makes a distinct contribution towards transnational capitalist hegemony both by building consensus within the global corporate elite and by educating publics and states on the virtues of one or another variant of the neo–liberal paradigm. Analysis of corporate–policy interlocks reveals that a few dozen cosmopolitans – primarily men based in Europe and North America and actively engaged in corporate management – knit the network together via participation in transnational interlocking and/or multiple policy groups. As a structure underwriting transnational business activism, the network is highly centralized, yet from its core it extends unevenly to corporations and individuals positioned on its fringes. The policy groups pull the directorates of the worlds major corporations together, and collaterally integrate the lifeworld of the global corporate elite, but they do so selectively, reproducing regional differences in participation. These findings support the claim that a well–integrated global corporate elite has formed, and that global policy groups have contributed to its formation. Whether this elite confirms the arrival of a transnational capitalist class is a matter partly of semantics and partly of substance.

The Global Corporate Elite and the Transnational Policy-Planning Network, 1996-2006 A Structural Analysis

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.

Between Leninism and Radical Pluralism: Gramscian Reflections on Counter-Hegemony and the New Social Movements

The rigidities of Leninist views on socialist politics may have consigned orthodox Marxism to the status of historical relic, but equally problematic is the radical pluralist disavowal of any materially-grounded, unifying basis for counter-hegemony. The main features of these two perspectives are contrasted with a Gramscian viewpoint that arguably offers the best prospect for analyzing contemporary movement politics and strategizing about social change. This approach retains the insights of historical materialism, avoids the pitfalls of radical pluralism, and remains open to ongoing transformations in culture, politics, and capitalism.

Global Cities in the Global Corporate Network

Since the 1980s two separate literatures—one focused on global cities, the other on transnational corporate interlocking—have explored issues of hierarchy and networking within the global political economy. I present an analysis of how major cities and interlocking corporate directorates are articulated together into a global network. Findings indicate that the network is concentrated in the main world cities in a way that reinforces the northern transatlantic economic system. However, the structure of the network is more nationally focused, and more complex, than that predicted by global cities theorizations. To account for the structure, I present a multifactoral framework featuring sociohistorical processes as well as spatiotemporal constraints. In conclusion, I explore implications for sociological analysis of a ‘new network bourgeoisie’, invested with several kinds of corporate power and exercising agency both within and beyond the boardrooms of the worlds major corporations.

Problems in the Study of the Transnational Business Community A Reply to Kentor and Jang

In responding to Kentor and Jang’s article, the authors point to methodological problems that have led them to underestimate the level of interlocking in their reference year (1983), and thus to exaggerate the extent of the shift towards transnational interlocking. The authors also argue that Kentor and Jang fail to adequately theorize the social processes that produce corporate interlocks, and to place the practice of interlocking within its specific historical settings. It is only on the basis of sound conceptualization, valid empirical data and detailed, contextualized analysis that the contours and character of the emerging transnational business community can be ascertained.

Social Democracy, Neo-Conservatism and Hegemonic Crisis in British Columbia

This paper adopts a Gramscian perspective in presenting a case study of hegemonic crisis and political-economic restructuring. In British Columbia, the period from 1983 through 1987 marked a decisive shift from a variant of Fordism to a neo-conservative project with strong resonances of Thatcherism. Focusing on the historical specificity of the province in the Canadian political economy and the political crises of 1983 and 1987, we explore the structural and strategic reasons for this transformation, and examine the obstacles confronting the left in its hesitant attempts to mount a successful opposition around a counter-hegemonic project.

The corporate elite and the transformation of finance capital: a view from Canada

Since 1905, when Otto Jeidels published the results of his research on the relationship of the big German banks to industry, the overlapping elite affiliations of corporate directors have been an issue of recognized importance for social scientists and political activists alike. In Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (1975 [1917]), one of the formative texts of the 20th-century revolutionary left, Lenin quoted Jeidels’s study extensively, presenting the coalescence of different forms of capital under the control of the most powerful corporate directors as a criterial attribute of advanced capitalism:

Hegemony, Counter-hegemony, Anti-hegemony

This article takes a critical realist stance in exploring the changing conditions for and forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony in “postmodern”, “neoliberal”, “globalized” times. Current hegemonic practices and projects make common sense of a market-driven politics and a fragmented culture, infusing into them an organization of consent that operates both locally and globally. Yet this amounts only to a thin hegemony, a weak and ecologically unsustainable basis for social cohesion and material reproduction. If contemporary hegemony is deeply yet perilously grounded then counter-hegemony needs to address those grounds. This stricture points to the articulation of various subaltern and progressive-democratic currents into a counter-hegemonic bloc that organizes dissent across space and time. Counter-hegemony needs to walk on both legs, taking up statecentred issues as well as issues resident in national and transnational civil societies. Its durability across conjunctures requires not only a shared ethical vision but a political form appropriate to its tasks. A range of recent developments relevant to these issues is discussed. The article concludes with a critique of the anti-hegemonic politics of dispersed singularities, whose insights, particularly on the value of direct action and prefiguration, need to be integrated into a strategically coherent form.