The power of large business corporations has been increasingly discussed in the media and academia in the past few decades. A variety of phenomena have been problematized, such as the market power of big players in increasingly oligopolistic industries; or the considerable lobbying power and potential for regulatory capture of certain key industries in Western democracies. In fields closely connected to management and organization studies, recent works on 'corporate political activity' (e.g. den Hond, Rehbein, de Bakker & Kooijmans-van Lankveld, in press) and 'political CSR' (e.g. Scherer & Palazzo, 2007) have not only contributed to an instrumental understanding of the political involvement of corporations but also problematized this involvement as one that should not only be seen from a narrow 'business case' perspective. And yet more recent agenda-setting efforts seem to suggest that more discussion on 'The Corporatization of Politics and the Politicization of Corporations' (de Cock, Nyberg & Wright, 2013) is on its way within organization studies broadly construed. However, the corporation has rarely been conceptualized explicitly and chiefly as 'a governing institution'. This is what Stephen Wilks sets out to do in this book, in which he begins by noting that 'the business corporation is arguably the most influential and least studied institution in contemporary political life' (p. 1).
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